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Post 0

Saturday, March 8, 2008 - 1:37pmSanction this postReply
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What personally sparked my interest -- though whatever sparked my interest is retroactively irrelevant to this list's importance -- what personally sparked my interest in compiling this comprehensive catalog of human reason and opinion, was the current concrete example of an executive power attempting to cut itself loose from the historical restraints imposed by the judicial branch of government.

The specific case that prompted this general good thing that I've done here involved myself becoming aware not just of warrant-less wiretapping, but the more recent and more telling interest in even "FISA-less" domestic spying. This is, as is eloquently illustrated in the 1958 quote above, to "indulge in actions that previously seemed so improbable of achievement as to be put beyond the realm of serious contemplation."

Ed

Post 1

Saturday, March 8, 2008 - 2:30pmSanction this postReply
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and ye still think there's not going to be declared a martial law before the end of the year?

Post 2

Saturday, March 8, 2008 - 2:54pmSanction this postReply
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Rev', martial law in the U.S.?? ... Pahleeze!

Now THAT'S so improbable that it's beyond the realm of serious contemplation!

;-)

Ed

Post 3

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 1:17pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks for compiling a thought-provoking list of quotes.

Post 4

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 2:13pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks for allowing your mind to become infected with them, Marty. Let's hope that this country undergoes a 'spontaneous remission' regarding the noted slippery slope to Statism.

;-)

Ed


Post 5

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 4:36pmSanction this postReply
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I have been reading about The Disappeareds of Argentina in A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict.  Political violence and military rule have been the norm in Argentina.  But the violence was more like crime in America: a constant undercurrent that usually happened to someone else.  Then, in one year, disappearances rose from hundreds... to thousands... to tens of thousands ....

As you noted in Post 0, Ed, the encroachments continue.  And yet, can you say that you have lost any freedoms?  Airline passenger searches go back to the 1970s. What has changed?  Anything?

Let me ask a different question.  If America's government crossed the line, do you know the moment when it happened?

Answer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZ3aNWaEw4
 
 


Post 6

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 7:09pmSanction this postReply
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Ed, thanks for a really fascinating and impressive series of quotations about the malevolence and destructiveness of power. It is interesting that these quotations, which span over 300 years, each warn of the mortal danger of assigning central power to another.

Recently, it dawned on me that there are many instances in the history of primitive societies in which no centralized power exists. For example, this was true of a loose tribal culture in New Guinni. None of the American Indian tribes that I have read about were ruled by a "chief" who held coercive power over other members of his tribe. The chiefs led through example and personal influence. There was no centralized coercive authority among the ancient desert nomads of the Islamic Middle East, according to a history book I read about the region. Order was achieved by pacts among familes and clans. I have heard that this was true of ancient Iceland, another economically primitive society.

I suspect the reason that primitive societies apparently often function without a coercive central power is that primitive societies, of nomads, or subsistence farmers, or hunters, offer very little for a conquering ruler to steal through the imposition of a protection racket. Yet people managed to live peacefully among themselves without Charlemangne or FDR or Ghengis Khan or John McCain.


Post 7

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 7:51pmSanction this postReply
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I suspect the reason that primitive societies apparently often function without a coercive central power is that primitive societies, of nomads, or subsistence farmers, or hunters, offer very little for a conquering ruler to steal through the imposition of a protection racket.

Cart before the horse, Mark.  The reason that these societies do not have coercive rulers is that they do not have social stratification.  Mobile societies cannot carry much with them, so there is not much with which to show status.  The chief "rules" as it is by acceptance.  As my anthropology professor put it, "OK, we'll do what you suggest, but if this does not work out, it's all on you, pal."


Post 8

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 9:58pmSanction this postReply
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Michael, whether that's the point where we crossed the line or sometime after it -- that video is direct evidence of an American low-point.

Ed


Post 9

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 10:12pmSanction this postReply
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Mark,

Thanks for pointing out to me that my compilation spans more than 300 years. I hadn't been explicitly aware of that until just then!

Regarding how folks existed in pockets of peace without despots to lord over them, James Donald says it best (watch for my added emphasis) ...

In this paper I have used several different definitions of natural law, often without indicating which definition I was using, often without knowing or caring which definition I was using. Among the definitions that I use are:
  • The medieval/legal definition: Natural law cannot be defined in the way that positive law is defined, and to attempt to do so plays into the hands of the enemies of freedom. Natural law is best defined by pointing at particular examples, as a biologist defines a species by pointing at a particular animal, a type specimen preserved in formalin. (This definition is the most widely used, and is probably the most useful definition for lawyers)

  • The historical state of nature definition: Natural law is that law which corresponds to a spontaneous order in the absence of a state and which is enforced, (in the absence of better methods), by individual unorganized violence, in particular the law that historically existed (in so far as any law existed) during the dark ages among the mingled barbarians that overran the Roman Empire.

  • The medieval / philosophical definition: Natural law is that law, which it is proper to uphold by unorganized individual violence, whether a state is present or absent, and for which, in the absence of orderly society, it is proper to punish violators by unorganized individual violence. Locke gives the example of Cain, in the absence of orderly society, and the example of a mugger, where the state exists, but is not present at the crime. Note Locke's important distinction between the state and society. For example trial by jury originated in places and times where there was no state power, or where the state was violently hostile to due process and the rule of law but was too weak and distant to entirely suppress it.

  • The scientific/ sociobiological/ game theoretic/ evolutionary definition: Natural law is, or follows from, an ESS for the use of force: Conduct which violates natural law is conduct such that, if a man were to use individual unorganized violence to prevent such conduct, or, in the absence of orderly society, use individual unorganized violence to punish such conduct, then such violence would not indicate that the person using such violence, (violence in accord with natural law) is a danger to a reasonable man. This definition is equivalent to the definition that comes from the game theory of iterated three or more player non zero sum games, applied to evolutionary theory. The idea of law, of actions being lawful or unlawful, has the emotional significance that it does have, because this ESS for the use of force is part of our nature.
Justice is human.

Ed


Post 10

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 - 5:52pmSanction this postReply
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Michael: We disagree. I don't claim to have an encyclopediac knowlege of history, or anything close. But I've noticed over years of reading history that any time people accumulate substantial wealth that cannot be easily moved or hidden, there is a state actively engaged in expropriating, commanding, taxing, decreeing, proclaiming, killing, and enslaving. One bright day, it occurred to me that the reason this is not coincidence is simple: states exist as parasites, institutionalized coercion. They can't produce anything of much value, so to survive and flourish, states need wealth available for seizure. If that wealth is unavailable or easily portable or readily hidden, I suspect that the state will go out of existence.

You suggested that I have the cart before the horse, because A) If a society appears to lack a state, that appearance is misleading. People always organize around essentially coercive relationships that might only appear to be voluntary. So the chief, in your example from your anthropology course, doesn't issue explicitly threatening commands to his followers, but the threat is still implicit and real. Similarly, the followers don't explcitly threaten the leader, but the leader "knows" that his head may roll if his commands yield failure. B) Political leadership attaches to those who acquire elevated status in their society, but nomads and subsistance people lack the possessions that prove higher status; therefore, they cannot engage in politicking.

If the above describes your ideas, A and B look mutually contradictory. Furthermore, both seem false to me: A because voluntary relationships pertaining to personal security have existed historically; and B, because nomadic tribes in the American West did acquire property that was both portable and that conferred on large owners public standing and respect. For one example, the Navaho Indians who ranged over Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado learned sheep and horse breeding from Spanish Conquistadors. There was no "Navaho Nation" for the Spanish or the New Mexicans or later, the Americans to conquer and subjugate; for the "tribe" consisted of roving sub-bands and extended families (like in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the early Middle East). Each extended family or band of families would range over the vast and parched desert landscape in pursuit of grass and water for their great herds of sheep and horses. A band would feature one or two "headmen" who rose to prominance mainly because of success in acquiring wealth in sheep, turquoise, horses, and so forth; and also because of demonstrated leadership and courage in battles with the Mexicans and hostile tribes. Members of a band would often follow the lead of the widely respected headman, but no family or individual were forced to go where they chose not to. Familes split off and went their own way. (At least, that's what I've read.)

This is true of many tribes, even including farmers, such as the Mandans and Pueblo Indians. People remained in tribes, obviously, for protection and society. American military conquerers were rather perplexed when seeking to impose demands on various tribes that no Big Chief (comparable to the leader of a state) existed. So they improvised by inventing Big Chief's, so they could get a signature--an X, obviously--from cooperative chiefs.

I'm not arguing for "anarchy" here, because justice requires widespread respect, and the means for enforcement, of objective natural laws. But I do think that proper government can become instituted through voluntary, reciprocal, and mutually beneficial long-term relationships. Throughout American history, particularly in the West, men were frequently engaged in score settling, masaquering innocent people for the sake of retribution for previous wrongs committed by another, and killing out of hatred. This characterisation applies mainly to disputes between Americans or New Mexicans and Indians, and believe me, representatives of each race committed atrocities. Other representatives--Indian and Anglo and Spanish--foresaw the dire consequences of making war, and were remarkably rational and restrained in wielding force as a last resort.
                                   ********************************************************************************************

Ed, the defintions are interesting, especially the reference to jury trials taking root in areas that lacked a state.


Post 11

Friday, March 21, 2008 - 1:15pmSanction this postReply
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Individualism quotes continued …

65
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Freedom can’t be kept for nothing. If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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1654
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It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it. – Oliver Cromwell
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1748
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There is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. – Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
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Mid-1700s
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To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused. – Lord George Lyttleton
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1755
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Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin
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1756
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All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws. -- Voltaire
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1779
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To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. – Thomas Jefferson
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1783
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The public good is nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual’s private rights. – William Blackstone
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1787
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A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular and what no just government should refuse to rest on inference. – Thomas Jefferson
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1791
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They make a point about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. – Samuel Johnson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending to small a degree of it. – Thomas Jefferson
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1795
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An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression: for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. – Thomas Paine
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1803
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Individuality is to be preserved and respected everywhere, as the root of everything good. – Jean Paul Richter
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1825
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Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may. – Daniel Webster
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1829
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As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending. – Andrew Jackson
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1849
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The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop. – Alexander Ivanovich Herzen

There will never be a free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power … and treats them accordingly. – Henry David Thoreau
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Mid-1800s
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Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. – Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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1856
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Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves. – Abraham Lincoln, US President
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1861
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If by mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of an clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution. – Abraham Lincoln
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1866
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No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. – Roger B. Taney, US Supreme Court Justice
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1870
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… I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily. … My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said “Let him touch it.” So I touched it—and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty. – John Ruskin
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1893
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To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. This is exactly what the state is doing. – Benjamin Tucker
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1911
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Excess of liberty contradicts itself. In short there is no such thing: there is only liberty for one and restraint for another. – Leonard T. Hobhouse
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1912
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Liberty has never come from government. … The history of liberty is a history of the limitations of government power, not the increase of it. – Woodrow Wilson, US President
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1917
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We must be able to agree to any sacrifice, and even, if need be, to resort to all sorts of tricks, slyness, illegal methods, evasion and concealment of truth. – V. I. Lenin
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1918
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Dictatorship is power based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. – V. I. Lenin
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1920
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The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority. … It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people. – Frank I. Cobb

Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected “radicals” without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail … we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity. – Robert M. Lafollette
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Early-1900s
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The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. – Emma Goldman
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1927
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Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties. … They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. – Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice
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1931
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In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, a criminal cast and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes. – PD Ouspensky
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1933
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Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul—religion and business. – John Maynard Keynes
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1935
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One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence. – Charles A. Beard
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1937
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs. – Walter Lippmann
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1941
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The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to the belief in our own guidance. Henry Miller

The party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time it exacted its willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives—and at the same time it demanded that he should always choose the right one. It denied his power to choose between good and evil—and at the same time it spoke accusingly of guilt and treachery. – Arthur Koestler
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Mid-1900s
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Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family. – Herbert Clark Hoover, US President
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1951
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The Communist theory of the dictatorship assumes that ultimate success in achieving the goal is certain—so certain as to justify a generation at least of poverty, slavery, hatred, spying, forced labor, extinction of independent thought, and refusal to cooperate in any way with the nations that have heretical governments. – Bertrand Russell
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1952
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I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry. I believe that the community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is mark of disaffection … where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. – Learned Hand, Judge, US Court of Appeals
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1953
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As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom’s defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America. – Dwight D. Eisenhower, US President

The deepest point of opposition between Marxism and Christianity comes from the fact that both are finally religious. – Roger L. Shinn
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1954
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Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment. – Henry Steele Commager
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1955
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Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise. – Alexander Meiklejohn
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1961
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The rule of the party knows no legal opposition, only opponents who must be “liquidated” because they are either ill-natured, owing to their origin or native character, or ill-disposed. Hence, the terrorism—which as a form of government maintains the fiction of the existence of dangerous enemies under various names, used to disparage the actual opposition of the basic human will to freedom: …, fascists, …, nationalists, imperialists. – Karl Jaspers
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1962
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It is my belief that there are “absolutes” in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be “absolutes.” – Hugo L. Black, US Supreme Court Justice

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism “inevitably” caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914, capitalism obviously “caused” the First World War; but just as obviously it had “caused” the previous generation of peace. – AJP Taylor
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1963
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Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights we are weakening our own claim to them. – Dwight D. Eisenhower, US President
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1964
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Far from being a classless society, Communism is governed by an elite as steadfast in its determination to maintain its perogatives as any oligarchy known to history. – Robert F. Kennedy
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1966
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We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can makes security more secure. – Sir Karl Popper

At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man … is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society. – Robert F. Kennedy
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1967
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The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face. – Potter Stewart, US Supreme Court Justice
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1968
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Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. … Both our institutions and the characteristics of our national behavior make it possible for opposition to be translated into policy, for dissent to prevail. We have alternatives to violence. – Abe Fortas
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1972
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The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights. … In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property. – Potter Stewart, US Supreme Court Justice

The revolt against freedom, which can be traced back so far, is associated with a revolt against reason that [gives] sentiment primacy, to evaluate actions and experiences according to the subjective emotions with which they are associated. – Louis J. Halle
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1974
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Socialism purports to do away with the inequalities and the savage competition of capitalist class societies. Even in its mildest forms, however, socialism creates new inequalities and new forms of competition. These inequalities are not the result of “class struggle” but of the hierarchical order of bureaucracy. –Peter L. Berger

A basic contradiction of most of the existing socialist systems is precisely this political fact—the contradiction of a dictatorship that defines itself as a democracy. – Peter L. Berger
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1977
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A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take away from you. – Ramsey Clark, US Attorney General
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1978
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In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect. – James Earl Carter, US President

The connection between the Gulag and Marx is obvious. It is not an accident which can be explained by bureaucracy, Stalinist deviation or Lenin’s errors. Rather it is a direct and ineluctable logical consequence of Marxist principles. – Monique Hirschhorn
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1984
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The classic liberal understanding of freedom is this: every individual should care for his own interests and mind his own business. No one should deem himself his brother’s keeper unless his brother unequivocally asks him to. Every individual is a world unto himself, is a being in himself and is presupposed to be the best judge of his own affairs; everyone should respect the wishes, beliefs, and way of life of others. – Mieszyslaw Maneli
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Ed


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