For why should my freedom be limited by what someone else thinks? Corinthians 10:29
Set this year apart as holy, a time to proclaim freedom throughout the land for all who live there.
It will be a jubilee year for you, when each of you may return to the land that belonged to your ancestors and return to your own clan.
— Leviticus 25:10
Origin of the Quaker motto that was
inscribed on the Liberty Bell at the suggestion of Isaac Norris
“When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth…and take all the fun out of it.”
Life does not cease to be funny when people die
any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
— George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)
“To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”
One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all”.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801)
“‘This is living!’ ‘I gotta be me!’ ‘Ain’t we got fun!’ It’s all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness. Search as you will the Maga Charta, the /Communist Manifesto/, the Ten Commandments, the Analects of Confucius, Plato’s /Republic/, the New Testament or the UN Charter, and find me any happiness at all.
There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
To modern ears they still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
— P.J.O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores (1991)
“Our Union is now complete; our constitution composed, established, and approved. You are now the guardians of your own liberties.”
Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood, and hunt us from the face of the earth?
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude, than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.
May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
— Samuel Adams, Son of Liberty, in a speech given to the Philadelphia state house (1776)
But Now You Know
Words of the Sentient 