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On Freedom and Security

"Freedom isn't free, and neither is security."
         ~ Richard Clarke

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
         ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it."
         ~ Rudy Giuliani, March 16, 1994

"Above all, we should not regard the absence of limits as freedom.  A leaf blown by the wind is not free in human terms.  A person without emotional ties to people or places is removed, not free.  Doing whatever one wants doesn't make one free.  Such behavior characterizes insane people, who are swept by the winds of their sensations without an awareness of reality."
         ~ Alexander Lowen, MD.

"You have to accept your own darker side, and that’s different from being nihilistic. It’s unhealthy not to; we live in a country that’s run by people that never question their own motives. They’re so sure they’re on the right side of every question that they’ll do anything."
         ~ John Talley-Jones of "The Urinals"

"I came out of a small prison to a big prison, because when I can't say my thoughts, I still live in a prison."
         ~ Mohsen Kadivar, leading Iranian reformist cleric

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
         ~ Thomas Jefferson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
         ~ Benjamin Franklin 1759

"We may think we can trade liberty for security or equality. On the contrary, we can have the measure of security and equality which we deserve only if we preserve liberty. If we trade liberty, we shall have nothing. And yet we are constantly being advised to trade it."
         ~ Henry Ford

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient...The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
         ~ Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me - Give me liberty or give me death!"
         ~ Patrick Henry

"The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
         ~ General Douglas MacArthur

"The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."
         ~ Lord Hoffman of Britain's highest court which ruled against indefinite detention of terror suspects.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins."
         ~ H.L. Mencken

"But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
       - John Adams

"Freedom is indivisible -- there is no 's' on the end of it. You can erode freedom, diminish it, but you cannot divide it and choose to keep 'some freedoms' while giving up others."
         ~ Ronald Reagan

"Stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty"
         ~ George W. Bush

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