Political Freedom Quotes - Page 4

• Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity. Those who refuse to vote are not expressing silence. They are screaming in the politician's ear: 'You do not represent me. This is not a process in which my voice matters. I do not believe you.'

  Wendy McElroy

  Believe, Voice, Voting

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• It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

  Niall Ferguson

  Country, People, Political

  "Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is" by William Skidelsky, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2011.

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• Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Spiritual, Numbers, Safety

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• The same thing will happen in China that happened in Chile. Political freedom will ultimately break out of its shackles. Tiananmen Square was only the first episode. It is headed for a series of Tiananmen Squares. It cannot continue to develop privately and at the same time maintain its authoritarian character politically. It is headed for a clash. Sooner or later, one or the other will give.

  Milton Friedman

  Character, Squares, Giving

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.

  Paul Goodman

  Political, World, Firsts

  Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.127, New York Review of Books

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• Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes.

  William S. Burroughs

  Morning, Thinking, Korea

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• The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Opportunity, Government, Average

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (1995). “The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt”, Gramercy

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• One way we exercise political freedom is to vote for the candidate of our choice. Another way is to use our money to try to persuade other voters to make a similar choice - that is, to contribute to our candidate's campaign. If either of these freedoms is violated, the consequences are very grave not only for the individual voter and contributor, but for the society whose free political processes depend on a wide distribution of political power.

  Barry Goldwater

  Exercise, Political, Choices

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• It is important that social, political, and religious freedoms grow in China. A society which recognizes religious freedom is a society which will recognize political freedom as well.

  George W. Bush

  Religious, Political, Important

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• What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mean, Political, Moral Freedom

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.8, David M Gross

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• I assume that our colleagues from both the United States and the European Union will proceed from current humanitarian law and ensure political freedoms and rights of all people, including those who are living in the territory of Baltic states after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

  Vladimir Putin

  Law, Rights, People

  Source: www.russianembassy.org

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• You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Government, Political, Economic

  "New Vogue for Critic of Keynes" by John M. Geddes, The New York Times, May 7, 1979.

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• No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.

  Lysander Spooner

  War, Men, Self

  Lysander Spooner (1867). “No Treason: No. 1-”, p.3

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• If you do not force political freedom, economic freedom will be stymied sooner or later.

  Milton Friedman

  Political, Economic, Force

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Roots

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.108, TAN Books

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• Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit proceeding from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.

  Herbert Hoover

  Wisdom, Political, Realization

  United States. President (1929-1933 : Hoover), Herbert Hoover (1974). “Herbert Hoover: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President”

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• Whatever may be the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to that safety arising from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise. That is the faith, the experimental faith, by which we Americans have undertaken to live.

  Alexander Meiklejohn

  Wise, Loss, Safety

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• the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

  Hannah Arendt

  Government, Tyrants, Political

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• Thought ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately ... no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

  Hannah Arendt

  Thinking, Men, Political

  The Human Condition ch. 45 (1958)

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• Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it. Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Support

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• With the end of communism and the opening of Third World markets, the potential for Playboy is huge. It has been said that the two most famous trademarks in the world are Coca-Cola and the Playboy bunny rabbit. There is certainly no one else in our area that represents the American dream in this particular kind of way. That rabbit means economic freedom, personal freedom and political freedom. That potential is unlimited.

  Hugh Hefner

  Dream, Mean, Political

  "Los Angeles Times Interview: Hugh Hefner: in the Shadow of Aids, Examining What's Left of the Sexual Revolution". articles.latimes.com. July 31, 1994.

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• Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

  Will Durant

  Government, Political, Liberty

  Will Durant (2011). “The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization”, p.205, Simon and Schuster

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• We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

  Karl Popper

  Freedom, Political, Promise

  Karl Popper (2013). “All Life is Problem Solving”, p.92, Routledge

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