12 quotes
History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
A republic is not possible in the Soviet Union because the aim of its rulers is an economic aim. Economic power differs from political power.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as ‘war,’ ‘glory,’ ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘home,’ mean the same in two languages, is an error.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
No jailer can compel any prisoner to speak or act against that prisoner's will, but chains can prevent his acting, and a gag can prevent his speaking.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
What I can't understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism. Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
The Communist hope of economic equality in the Soviet Union rests now on the death of all men and women who are individuals. A new generation, they tell me, had already been so shaped and schooled that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee-swarm, the ant-hill.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
For nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar. I am not an alarmist; that is plain fact.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.
Give Me Liberty (1936)