Calvin Coolidge Quotes

Liberalism is the answer for which modernity is the question

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

Let's have a People's Vote to safeguard gender equality and continue the drive towards a fairer world for us all.

I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth - matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense.

With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.

The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

We would solve a lot of huge problems that are causing massive suffering. Poverty, violence, homophobia, heterosexism, racism, the environment - all these things that are crippling us. We need big, bold, dangerous, crazy ideas to solve these problems. When failure is not an option, innovation and creativity are not options.

We should not be followers of traditions that go against human rights...we are human beings and we make traditions.

If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.

Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.

Let us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty!

First there is the democratic idea: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights; that these rights are alienable only by the possessor thereof; that they are equal in men; that government is to organize these natural, unalienable and equal rights into institutions designed for the good of the governed, and therefore government is to be of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. Here government is development, not exploitation.

I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy....liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth.

True, the movement for woman's rights has broken many old fetters, but it has also forged new ones.

You have a right to say what you believe, and I have a right.

We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man. In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed.

It's not enough to be tolerant...now we're finally moving towards the idea of acceptance.

I insist that people - wherever they live - have their rights and they must be able to fight for them.

Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.

He who would save liberty must put his trust in democracy.

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few, but the universal right of all God's children.

Think of US slavery in 1850, or the subjection of women. Both of these injustices could have been - and were! - defended by pointing out, quite correctly, that this situation of slaves and women had been improving throughout the preceding century. Slaves, in particular, were worked less hard, beaten and raped less frequently, better fed, and less often ripped apart from their families. So would a celebration of moral progress have been appropriate in 1850? Surely not. Slavery could have been and should have been abolished - then, if not before.