Tom Robbins Quotes

The cure for evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression.

Break up the printing presses and you break up rebellion.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

The seed of revolution is repression.

It is dangerous to speak the truth to tyrants.

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious.

Instead of contributing to the restoration of liberty they enlist of their own free will under the flag of the Spanish tyrants and most actively co-operate to our destruction

When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.

Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Even if the country is run by a Mussolini, free speech will find its way.

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?

It is in the nature of tyranny to deride the will of the people as the voice of the mob, and to denounce the cry for freedom as the roar of anarchy.

Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

Don't let the government win.

Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom.