SCAMP'S QUOTES: Today's topic of Irritation: Liberty and Freedom:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

-- Amendment 1, United States Constitution,Dec. 15, 1791

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable."

-- Theodore Roosevelt

"People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh, "Living Buddha, Living Christ"

"Consider the history of America closely. Never has America lost a war. When engaged in warfare the United States has always applied the principle of overkill and mercilessly stamped its opposition into the dust . . . But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies."

-- Vine Deloria Jr., "Custer Died For Your Sins"

"America is about liberty, or it is about nothing."

-- Richard Brookhiser, "What Would the Founders Do"

"Nature averse to crime? I tell you that Nature lives and breathes by it, hungers at all her pores for bloodshed, yearns with all her heart for the furtherance of cruelty."

-- Marquis de Sade

"We have forgotten the very principle of our origins, if we forget how to object, how to resist, how to agitate, how to pull down and build up, even to the extent of revolutionary practices if it be necessary."

-- Woodrow Wilson

"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate."

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, "U.S. v. Schwimmer, 1928"

"When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, he has a right to his opinion, as I to mine. Why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion?"

-- Thomas Jefferson

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

-- Kris Kristofferson, "Me and Bobby McGee"

"Nobody gives anybody their freedom. People can only deny somebody their freedom. . . They don't give us anything! You've got to get that clear in your mind."

-- Stokely Carmichael

"If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?"

-- Richard M. Nixon

"If the people will lead, eventually the leaders will follow."

-- Florence Robinson

"Our republics cannot long exist in prosperity. We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed."

-- Dr. Benjamin Rush, "letter to John Adams July 13, 1780"

"Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the Right of another: And this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know. This sacred Priviledge is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together . . . Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech..."

-- Benjamin Franklin, "8th Silence Dogood Letter, July 2, 1722"

"The gravest dangers to our free society are born-again apostles of one particular liberty and freedom who are incapable of imagining any way except their own. The greatest hope is that we have so many of these people, and their beliefs are so diverse. If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom. Many single-minded apostles of a narrow idea of a free society have become tyrants in their turn."

-- David Hackett Fischer, "Liberty and Freedom"