Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

All of us are in the same place, each with our own rooms, and we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. Which is totally different than college, where they manage your schedule for you. In the NBA, you’re on your own.

Respect is one of life’s greatest treasures. I mean, what does it all add up to if you don’t have that?

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

When I am free to train and free to move, I feel like a gorilla in the jungle. Then, when there are a bunch of media obligations, I feel like I have been captured and am being kept on display.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the goverment.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

The spirit is the true self. The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure.

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what’s right. Freedom is right.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.

Most liberals think of civil liberties as their Achilles heel. It isn’t.

We don’t hide our space program. We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

What I worry about would be that you essentially have two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply, majoritarian, absolute power on either side. And that’s just not what the founders intended.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

Fear is present when we forget that we are a part of God’s divine design. Learning to experience authentic love means abandoning ego’s insistence that you have much to fear and that you are in an unfriendly world. You can make the decision to be free from fear and doubt and return to the brilliant light of love that is always with you.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Self-government can succeed only through an instructed electorate.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‚nirvana‘ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.