Dear
Lovers of Liberty, the struggle is
just beginning! Get ready...
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"A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature
of man."
Tacitus, (55-117 A.D.)
"A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous
initiative of a few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid
the
passive acquiescence of all."
Tacitus
| "The more corrupt the
state, the more numerous the laws." Tacitus Get great bumper stickers @ LibertyStickers.com! |
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"The Romans brought devestation, but they called it
peace."
Tacitus
"The lust
for power in dominating others inflames the
heart more than any other passion."
Tacitus, Source: The Histories
Roger B. Taney
(1777-1864),
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"It is impossible for that man to despair who remembers that his Helper is omnipotent."
Jeremy Taylor, (1616-1667)
"He who would do good" wrote William Blake, "must do so in minute particulars. General
good is the plea of the scoundrel, the hypocrite and the liar." It is also the plea of
most political ideologues who do not hesitate, and often in the name of "the People", to
persecute in minute particulars for the sake of the general good. The idea that heaven on
earth is possible through the implementation of a political ideal is one of the most
destructive ideas we have ever played with."
Jeremy Taylor, (1937- ) 'Ag Pleez Deddy - a South African musician'
"Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person."
Mother Teresa, (1910-1997) Albanian Missionary
"An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do."
Dylan Thomas, (1914 - 1953)
Henry
David Thoreau (1817-1862) Walden [1854], "Conclusion"
"What is human warfare but just
this; an effort to make
the laws of God and nature take sides with one party."
"Disobedience is
the true foundation of liberty. The obedient
must be slaves."
"The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable."
"God does not sympathize with the popular movements."
"In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at
something high."
"If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the
agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849
"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to
make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very
atmosphere and medium through which we look.... To affect the quality of the day - that
is the highest of arts."
"If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and
waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this
makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in
outward respects."
"Thank God
men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!"
"There is no remedy for love but
to love more."
"That man
is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."
"The
character inherent in the American people has done all that has been
accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government
had not sometimes got in its way."
"If
you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is
where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
"In any
weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to
improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the
meeting
of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the
present
moment; to toe that line."
"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.
I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began
by reading, I must finish by acting."
"Under a
government which imprisons any unjustly, the
true place for a just man
is in prison."
Source:
Stray Birds, 1849
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
"I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?"
"I went to the store the other day to buy a bolt for our front door, for, as I told the storekeeper, the Governor was coming here. Aye, said he, and the Legislature too. Then I will take two bolts, said I."
"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life."
"Somehow
strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their
virtue has none to plead its cause -- nor any charter of immunities and
rights."
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."
"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so
many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some
ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile,
and then given his body to the dogs."
"Colors fade, temples crumble, but wise words endure."
Edward L. Thorndike
"All human beings should try to learn before they die,
What they are running from, and to, and why."
James Thurber, (1894 - 1961)
"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist
makes fun of himself."
James Thurber
"I hate women because they always know where things are."
James Thurber
"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to
heaven, and very , very few persons."
James Thurber
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
James Thurber
"Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor,
throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority."
James Thurber
"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
James Thurber
"During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade
often under the guise of patriotism."
Howard Thurman
"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence."
Henrik Tikkanen
"God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him."
Paul
Tillich (1886-1965), Liberal Theologian
Bruce Tinsley in the comic strip "Mallard Fillmore"
| "The American Republic
will endure, until politicians realize they
can bribe the people with
their
own money."
Alexis de
Tocqueville,
(1805-1859) French historian "The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other." "No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country." |
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Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: "Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.""
"Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details."
"There
is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality
which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion
tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists
also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which
impels
the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to
prefer
equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.
I believe that it is
easier
to establish an absolute and despotic government
amongst a people in
which
the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I
think
that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people,
it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them
of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore,
appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic
times."
Democracy
in America, Book 1 Chapter III [1835]
"Unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing.
Human beings are not competent to exercise it with discretion. God
alone can be omnipotent, because his wisdom and his justice are always
equal to his power. There is no power on earth so worthy of honor in
itself, or clothed with rights so sacred, that I would admit its
uncontrolled and all-predominant authority. When I see that the right
and the means of absolute command are conferred on any power whatever,
be it called a people or a king, an aristocracy or a republic, I say
there is the germ of tyranny, and I seek to
live elsewhere, under other laws."
Democracy in America [1835]
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it."
Democracy in America (1835)
"....I am of the opinion that a centralized administration is fit only to enervate the nations in which it exists, by incessantly diminishing their local spirit. Although such an administration can bring together at a given moment, on a given point, all the disposable resources of a people, it injures the renewal of those resources."
"Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot."
"Democracy in America"
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common save one word: equality, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude, while democracy seeks equality in liberty."
"The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave."
"The Old Regime and the French Revolution" (1856)
"After
having thus successively taken each member of the community in its
powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then
extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of
society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform,
through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters
cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not
shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to
act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents
existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates,
extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to
nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which
the government is the shepherd."
"What good
does it do
me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure
that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off
all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if
that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is
also absolute master of my liberty and my
life; if it monopolizes
vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes,
everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also
perish?"
"Some who have read the book ("The Lord of the Rings"), or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer."
J.R.R.
Tolkien, on his critics
"All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that
wander are lost."
"Forget about your life situation and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your
life is now. Your life situation is mind - stuff. Your life is real."Eckhart Tolle, from the 'Power of Now'"ENLIGHTENMENT: consciously chosen means to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make the Now
the main focus of your life."
Eckhart Tolle
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"Everyone
thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
Leo
Tolstoy, (1828-1910)
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"The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned
jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books
an ideal of government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who
oppress their fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific
postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest
of the nation.
They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended
by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice
is one of the duties of governments.
History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of
Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their
very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at
command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready
for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will
have
no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will
never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and
submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence."
Source: Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence (Signet Books,
1968), pp. 238-239
"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all
that is not gold."
"The
greater the state, the more wrong and cruel
its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of
suffering upon which its
power is founded."
"When [ignorance] does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid."
(1828-1910) A Confession [1882], Chapter 7
"The strongest of all warriors are these two - time and patience."
(1828-1910) War and Peace [1865-1869], Book X, Chapter 16
"Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most
indubitable meaning
is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's
ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity,
common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission
to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever
patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery."
Christianity and
Patriotism
"Men who
can undertake to fulfill with unquestioning submission all
that is decreed by men they do not know... cannot be rational; and
the governments - that is, the men wielding such power - can still less
be
reasonable. They cannot but misuse such insensate and terrible power
and cannot but be crazed by wielding it. For this reason peace between
nations cannot be attained by this reasonable method of conventions and
arbitrations so long as that submission of the peoples to governments,
which is always irrational and pernicious, still continues.
But the subjection of men to government will always continue as
long as patriotism exists, for every ruling
power rests on
patriotism - on the readiness of men to submit to
power..."
Christianity and
Patriotism
"To destroy
governmental violence only one thing is needed: it is that
people should understand that the feeling of patriotism
which alone
supports that instrument of violence is a rude, harmful, disgraceful,
and bad feeling, and above all is immoral. It is a rude feeling because
it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality
and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are
ready to inflict. It is a harmful feeling because it disturbs
advantageous and joyous peaceful relations with other peoples, and
above all produces that governmental organization under which power may
fall and does fall into the hands of the worst men. It is a disgraceful
feeling because it turns man not merely into a slave but into a
fighting ####, a bull, or a gladiator, who wastes his strength and his
life for objects which are not his own, but his government's. It is an
immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . .
. or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the
influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and
the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason
and conscience."
Patriotism and
Government
"[D]iscipline
consists in this, that the men who undergo the
instruction and have followed it for a certain time are completely
deprived of everything which is precious to a man - of the chief human
property, rational freedom - and become submissive, machine-like
implements of murder in the hands of their organized hierarchic
authorities."
Patriotism and
Government
"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty."
"Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism.
One would expect the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be
self-evident to everyone. But the surprising fact is that cultured and
learned people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of
patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest
obstinacy and passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to
praise it as beneficent and elevating."
Arnold Toynbee, (1889-1975)
"America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair."
Arnold Toynbee
"Of the twenty-two civilisations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now."
Arnold
Toynbee
"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between
work and play."
Arnold J. Toynbee
"Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the
man who refuses to believe anything."
A.W. Tozer, 1897-1963, The Root of the Righteous
"The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think of yourself whether much of your
sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set
yourself up as as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will
delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The
heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor
from the bad opinion of friend and enemy will never let the mind have rest."
A.W. Tozer
"The teaching of the New Testament is that now, at this very moment, there is a Man in
heaven appearing in the presence of God for us. He is as certainly a man as was Adam or
Moses or Paul; he is a man glorified, but his glorification did not de-humanize him. Today
he is a real man, of the race of mankind, bearing our lineaments and dimensions, a visible
and audible man, whom any other man would recognize instantly as one of us.But more than
this, he is the heir of all things, Lord of all lords, head of the church, firstborn of
the new creation. He is the way to God, the life of the believer, the hope of Israel, and
the high priest of every true worshiper. He holds the keys of death and hell, and stands
as advocate and surety for everyone who believes on him in truth. Salvation comes not by
accepting the finished work, or deciding for Christ; it comes by believing on the Lord
Jesus Christ, the whole, living, victorious Lord who, as God and man, fought our fight and
won it, accepted our debt as his own and paid it, took our sins and died under them, and
rose again to set us free. This is the true Christ; nothing less will do."
A.W. Tozer
"It's the misfortune of all Countries, that they sometimes lie under a unhappy necessity
to defend themselves by Arms against the ambition of their Governors, and to fight for
what's their own. If those in government are heedless of reason, the people must patiently
submit to #######, or stand upon their own Defence; which if they are enabled to do, they
shall never be put upon it, but their Swords may grow rusty in their hands; for that
Nation is surest to live in Peace, that is most capable of making War; and a Man that hath
a Sword by his side, shall have least occasion to make use of it."
John Trenchard, (1662-1723)Source: and Walter Moyle (1672-1721), "An Argument, shewing;
that a standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government and Absolutely Destructive to
the Constitution of the English Monarchy," (London, 1697)
"Don't bother about genius. Don't worry about being clever. Trust to hard work,
perseverance and determination."
Sir Frederick Treves, (1853-1923) English Surgeon
"Democracy is necessitated by the fact that all men are sinners; it is made possible by
the fact that we know it. ..."
Elton Trueblood, (1900-1994)
Harry S. Truman,
(1884 - 1972)
33rd US President
"Once a government is committed to the principle of
silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that
is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes
a source of terror to all its citizens and
creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
Harry
S Truman
"If you
cannot convince them, confuse them."
Harry S. Truman
"When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."
Harry S. Truman
"A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way."
John Tudor
Ted Turner (Idiot)
"The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life."
Ted
Turner at Brown University
William Tyndale (1492-1536) in argument with a scholar.
Lord
Alexander Fraser Tyler, (1742-1813) Scottish
jurist and historian
Source: The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic, c.1799
