and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.-Abraham Lincoln (1865). Human rights and constitutional privileges must not be forgotten in the race for wealth and commercial supremacy. The Government of the people must be by the people and not by a few of the people. It must rest upon the free consent of the governed and all of the governed. Power, it must be remembered, which is secured by oppressions or usurpation or by any form of injustice is soon dethroned.-William McKinley (1900). Man is a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice.-Thomas Jefferson (1823). Where justice reigns, 'tis freedom to obey.-James Montgomery (1850). Equality We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.-Thomas Jefferson (1776). The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.-Benjamin Disraeli (1870). The government of the Union, then, is emphatically and truly a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them and for their benefit.— John Marshall (1819). Where slavery is there liberty cannot be, and where liberty is there slavery cannot be.-Charles Sumner (1861). By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. So in the wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels until all our fellows ascend with us. There is no true liberty for the individual except as he finds it in the liberty of all. There is no true security for the individual except as he finds it in the security of all.-Edwin Markham (1902). He whom you call your slave is sprung from the same source, enjoys the same skies, breathes, lives and dies no otherwise than you. A slave he is; but he is, perhaps, a freeman in mind, and show me who is not a slave. One serves his lust; another his avarice; another his ambition; all of us are slaves to fear.Seneca (64 A. D.). The Great Spirit did not make men that they might destroy one another, but doing to each other all the good in their power, and thus filling the land with happiness instead of misery and murder.-Thomas Jefferson (1809). The black man who cannot let love and sympathy go out to the white man is but half free. The white man who retards his own development by opposing a black man is but half free.-Booker T. Washington (1897). The equal right of all men is as clear as their equal right to breathe the airit is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.-Henry George (1889). The North! the South! the West! the East ! No one the most and none the least, But each with its own heart and mind, Each of its own distinctive kind, No North, no South, no East, no West, -Edmund Vance Cooke (1915). Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites who really enrich and strengthen a country. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effect, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.— George Mason (1787). The progress of the elements of our nature towards a balance is the epitome of all history, and Liberty is the exercise of that balance.-Margaret L. Petrie (1874). We grant no dukedoms to the few, Equal on Sunday in the pew, On Monday in the mall. For what avail the plough or sail, -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.-Abraham Lincoln (1861). Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.-Francois Voltaire (1760). To be a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.-George Berkeley (1748). In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public mattersthat he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. That it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations.-Edmund Burke (1789). We ought to remind ourselves every day of the ideals on which this country was founded-the ideals of opportunity for all people, equal rights for all.Joseph Pasternak (1940). Free Homes The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.William Pitt (1766). Near in importance to exemption from any arbitrary control of the person is that maxim of the common law which secures to the citizen immunity in his home against the prying eyes of the government and protection in person, property, and papers against even the process of the law, except in a few specified cases. The maxim that "every man's house is his castle," is made a part of our constitutional law in the clauses prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures, and has always been looked upon as of high value to the citizen.-Thomas M. Cooley (1898). The constitutional guaranty of the right of the people to be secure in their papers against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to their papers, thus closed against inspection, wherever they may be. Whilst in the mail, they can only be opened and examined under like warrant, issued upon similar oath or affirmation, particularly describing the thing to be seized, as is required when papers are subjected to search in one's own household. No law of Congress can place in the hands of officials connected with the postal service any authority to invade the secrecy of letters and such sealed packages in the mail; and all regulations adopted as to mail matter of this kind must be in subordination to the great principle embodied in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.-Stephen J. Field (1877). A man's house is his castle, and his home is his safest refuge.-Sir Edward Coke (1628). What We Read and Write There has never been an hour when the first aid to autocracy has not been the placing of the press in leash.-Melvin E. Stone (1873). The liberty of the press is essential to the nature of a free state.-Sir William Blackstone (1769). The press is the mistress of intelligence, and intelligence is mistress of the world.-Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1880). Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.-Thomas Jefferson (1816). It is now beginning to be felt that journalism is to modern Europe what political oratory was to Athens and Rome, and that, to become what it ought, it should be wielded by the same sort of men.-John Stuart Mill (1870). The freedom of the press is vital to human progress . . . Public opinion and the sources of its information may be controlled by despotism for a certain length of time. It is unthinkable, however, that such control can continue indefinitely. There must come a time when the instinct for individual expression will re assert itself and will begin anew that familiar course of discussion and debate which in the long run will lead back to democracy.-Nicholas Murray Butler (1936). It is necessary that every vehicle of communication, every instrument, and every faculty by which Mind can correspond with Mind, should remain entirely free from influence. The Press, as the most important and powerful vehicle of sentiment, should remain independent of Government, and only be subjected to the censorial jurisdiction of society. The establishment of a Licensor is, of all expedients, the most dangerous.-Tunis Wortman (1800). The printers can never leave us in a state of perfect rest and union of opinion. They would be no longer useful and would have to go to the plow.Thomas Jefferson (1801). The printer is a faithful servant. Without him tyrants and humbugs in all countries would have everything their own way.-Charles Dickens (1864). Public opinion has a more direct, a more comprehensive, a more efficient organ for its utterance, than a body of men sectionally chosen. The printingpress is a political element unknown to classic or feudal times. It absorbs in a great degree the duties of the sovereign, the priest, the parliament; it controls, it educates, it discusses.-Benjamin Disraeli (1873). Let it be impressed upon your minds, let it be instilled into your children, that the Liberty of the Press is the Palladium of all civil, political and religious Rights of Freemen.-Junius (1769). No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will.-Thomas Jefferson (1792). The Liberty of the Press-it is as the air we breathe; if we have it not, we die.-Old Political Toast. The enlargement of freedom has always been due to heretics who have been unrequited during their day and defamed when dead. No (other) publisher in any country ever incurred so much peril to free the press as Richard Carlile. Every British bookseller has profited by his intrepidity and endurance. Speculations of philosophy and science, which are now part of the common intelligence, power and profit, would have been stifled to this day but for him.-George Jacob Holyoake (1880). Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.-Thomas Jefferson (1786). I should feel myself called upon to protect an infidel or Mohammedan paper, if assailed; or to re-establish it, if destroyed; as much as a paper designed to advocate the truths of Christianity.-Edward Beecher (1876). Give me but the liberty of the press and I will give to the minister a venal house of peers. I will give him a corrupt and servile house of commons. I will give him the full swing of the patronage of office. I will give him the whole host of ministerial influence. I will give him all the power that place can confer upon him, to purchase up submission and overawe resistance; and yet, armed with the liberty of the press, I will go forth to meet him undis mayed. I will attack the mighty fabric of that mightier engine. I will shake down from its height corruption and bury it beneath the ruins of the abuses it was meant to shelter.-Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1810). The most essential problem in the making of a durable peace is in the dissolution of any partnership that may exist in any country between government and the press.-David Lawrence (1925). I am for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the constitution to silence by force, and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.-Thomas Jefferson (1799). Democracy believes in freedom of the press. No news should be suppressed, but neither should the agencies of information fall into the hands of undemocratic groups. The press and radio are among the most powerful of all the weapons of democracy. An enlightened press can educate farmers, workers and industrialists as to their common interests in genuinely productive capital.— Henry A. Wallace (1938). Truth Conscious that there was not a truth on earth which I feared should be known, I have lent myself willingly as the subject of a great experiment, which was to prove that an administration, conducting itself with integrity and common understanding, cannot be battered down, even by the falsehoods of a licentious press, and consequently still less by the press as restrained within the legal and wholesome limits of truth. This experiment was wanting for the world to demonstrate the falsehood of the pretext that freedom of the press is incompatible with orderly government. I have never, therefore, even contradicted the thousands of calumnies so industriously propagated against myself. But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandon itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty.—Thomas Jefferson (1807). Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly, as when they discuss it freely. A government can interfere in discussion only by making it less free than it would otherwise be. Men are most likely to form just opinions when they have no other wish than to know the truth and are exempt from all influence either of hopes and fears to support its doctrines. It carries on controversy not with reasons, but with threats and bribes. If it employs reasons, it does so not in virtue of any powers which belong to it as a government. Thus, instead of a contest between argument and argument, we have a contest between argument and force. Instead of a contest in which truth, from the natural Constitution of the human mind, has a decided advantage over falsehood, we have a contest in which truth can be victorious only by accident.-Thomas B. Macaulay (1830). If the Waters of Truth flow not in a continual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition; and although all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injury by licensing and prohibiting to doubt her strength.-John Milton (1659). |