“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”
-Abraham Lincoln expanding on an original quote by Rev. William John Henry Boetcker

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950),
“Back to Methuselah” (1921), part 1, act 1

my favorite quotes with no category:

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” – Albert Einstein

“Oh, whatever that your days may bring, no use hiding in a corner, cause that won’t change a thing.” – Led Zeppelin

you know I think I’m gonna be changing my nickname to Led Zeppelin here on blogs,besides..it rhymes with shalabieh

–“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing as S. G. Tallentyre in 1906 (commonly attributed to Voltaire, of whom Hall wrote a biography).

–“…if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).

–“In a free state, tongues too should be free.” Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (1516).

–“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell, Preface to Animal Farm (1946)

–“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.” Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992).

–“I have fought censorship all of my adult life. To me, the most precious of all rights in this marvelous country called the United States of America is the freedom to think, write and say whatever is on your mind… That freedom also extends to thoughts that are stupid, ignorant or incendiary. No one needs a First Amendment to write about how cute newborn babies are or to publish a recipe for strawberry shortcake. Nobody needs a First Amendment for innocuous or popular points of view. That’s point one. Point two is that the majority-you and I-must always protect the right of a minority-even a minority of one-to express the most outrageous and offensive ideas. Only then is total freedom of expression guaranteed.” Lyle Stuart in his introduction to The Turner Diaries

–“The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.” Robert H. Jackson

–“The principle of free thought is not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.” US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in United States v. Schwimmer (1929).

–“He wrote something stupid, a bunch of words that say something we don’t agree with. It’s only words and ideas, it’s not like he beat someone up, he’s not committing violence or hurting people, he’s simply saying something offensive that we do not want to hear because we don’t like it. If we suppress ideas we don’t like, the proponents of those ideas will probably fester in secret societies and explode in double-plus ungood ways and we will like those results even less. If we allow people to see their ideas, and we ignore them, they’ve had their chance and they don’t have to feel cheated about not getting exposure. Or if we really don’t like their ideas and really need to keep them from convincing other people to believe in them, the answer is to tell people why and they’ll learn. But you can’t just beat people up because you dislike their stupid opinion. If we go that route, then anyone who is willing to use force can suppress any opinion they don’t like, and maybe support opinions we don’t like. Then what you get is a society of brutality where it isn’t the best ideas that are seen by others, it’s only the ideas that have the most vicious thugs to back them up. And it becomes very hard for people to be willing to express any opinion if someone can just pop them one because they say something someone else doesn’t like.” – Supervisor 246 in Paul Robinson’s Instrument of God.