Quotes on Free Society

In a fully free society, taxation-or, to be exact, payment for governmental services-would be voluntary.

Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas. ... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, ... is fundamental to our free society.

There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.

Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.

I have no doubt that given a real choice, the vast majority of Muslims and Arabs, like everyone else will choose a free society over a fear society.

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.

In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.

Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.

In a free society, there comes a time when the truth - however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say - must be told.

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks - drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.