Edith Hamilton Quotes

We can see our liberties vanishing here in the United States... A little bit here and a little piece there... We can see it, we can feel it, and we can hear it.

When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state.

My experience and what scant understanding of politics I possess have convinced me that our peoples will only find well-being under compulsion; but my repugnance for compulsion is so great that I am loath to employ it even to achieve their well-being.

Authoritarianism provides a kind of negative stability. Democracy creates space to do a lot of things, sometimes bad things, dangerous things.

Which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?

A global government would almost by definition abusive. As someone who escaped from Communist government, how would I escape from global government.

Our liberty cannot depend on the good intention of those in power.

People who hand over democracy in exchange for economic security end up losing both things.

I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.

Empire and liberty.

All share complicity in the destruction of that much under-rated phenomenon called liberty.

I will keep my word. My father fled Cuba, and I will fight to defend liberty because my family knows what it's like to lose it.

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.

And we know that once we have a majority that are dependent upon the government, we will lose our freedom; it says we go into bondage. That's the next stage.

I couldn't have imagined that I would live long enough to see Egypt emancipated from decades of repression.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.