Tuesday, October 25, 2011

46. Quotations on Freedom and Rights (from"Simpson's Contemporary Quotations")

Quotations selected from
"Simpson's Contemporary Quotations",
compiled by James B. Simpson,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988
 
"If the United Nations
once admits
that international disputes
can be settled by using force,
then we will have destroyed
the foundation of the organization
and our best hope
of establishing a world order."

 -- Dwight D. Eisenhower,
34th US President,
on Israel's invasion of Egypt,
address to the nation,
February 20, 1957
[SCQ p. 49]
 
+++
 
"There is now
a balance
of terror."

-- Alex Quaison-Sackey,
Ghana,
President
of the General Assembly,
on worldwide representation
of nations
at the U.N.,
Quote, June 27, 1965
[SCQ p. 48]
 
+++
 
"Throughout history
it has been the inaction
of those
who could have acted,
the indifference
of those
who should have known better,
the silence
of the voice of justice
when it mattered most,
that has made it possible
for evil to triumph."
 
-- Haile Selassie,
Emperor of Ethiopia,
opening a special session
of the General Assembly
in Addis Ababa,
thus becoming the first ruler
to address both the
League of Nations
and the U.N.,
October 4, 1963
[SCQ p. 50]
 
+++
 
"No more war!
 
Never again war!
 
If you wish to be brothers,
drop your weapons."
 
-- Pope Paul VI,
to the General Assembly,
October 4, 1965
[SCQ p. 51]
 
+++
 
"Dreams
became issues
of East versus West.
 
Hopes
became political
rhetoric.
 
Progress
became a search
for power
and domination.
 
Somewhere
the truth
was lost
that people
don't make war,
governments do."
 
-- Ronald Reagan,
40th US President,
to the General Assembly,
following the Soviet
downing
of a Korean passenger plane,
September 26, 1983
[SCQ p. 51]
 
+++
 
"The more
you sweat
in peace,
the less
you bleed
in war."
 
-- Admiral Hyman G. Rickover,
US Navy,
retirement speech [1983],
recalled on his death,
July 8, 1986
[SCQ p. 56]
 
+++
 
"You take a fraction
of reality
and expand
on it.
 
It's very seldom
totally at odds
with the facts...
It's shaving
a piece
of reality off."
 
-- Frank Snepp,
former CIA agent,
on
DISINFORMATION.
Christian Science Monitor,
February 26, 1985
[SCQ p. 61]
 
+++
 
"I'm not a pacifist.
 
I was very much
for the war
against Hitler
and I also supported
the intervention
in Korea,
but in this war
we went in there
to steal
Vietnam."
 
-- Benjamin Spock,
after indictment
on charges
of aiding and abetting
resistance to
Selective Service laws,
news summaries,
January 5, 1968
[SCQ p. 61]
 
+++
 
"A right
is not what
someone gives you;
it's what
no one
can take from you."
 
-- Ramsey Clark,
US Attorney General,
New York Times,
October 2, 1977
[SCQ p. 64]
 
+++
 
"Since when
have we Americans
been expected
to bow submissively
to authority
and speak with awe
and reverence
to those
who represent us?"
 
-- William O. Douglas,
Associate Justice,
US Supreme Court,
statement on unfair arrests
for disorderly conduct,
recalled on his retirement,
November 12, 1975
[SCQ p. 64]
 
+++
 
"We who have
the final word
can speak softly
or angrily.
 
We can seek to
challenge
and annoy,
as we need not
stay docile
and
quiet."
 
-- William O. Douglas,
Associate Justice,
US Supreme Court,
statement on unfair arrests
for disorderly conduct,
recalled on his retirement,
November 12, 1975
[SCQ p. 64]
 
+++
 
"Integrity
is the key
to understanding
legal practice...
 
Law's empire
is defined by
attitude,
not territory
or power
or
process."
 
-- Ronald D. Dworkin,
Professor of Law,
New York University.
"Law's Empire",
Belknap Press/Harvard 1986,
quoted in
Christian Science Monitor,
May 20, 1986
[SCQ p. 65]
 
+++
 
"We are willing
to spend
the least amount of money
to keep a kid
at home,
more
to put him in a foster home
and
most
to institutionalize him."
 
-- Marian Wright Edelman,
quoted by Margie Casady,
"Society's Pushed-Out Children",
Psychology Today, June 1975
[SCQ p. 65]
 
+++
 
"All our work,
our whole life
is a matter of semantics,
because words
are the tools
with which we work,
the material
out of which
laws are made,
out of which
the Constitution
was written.
 
 Everything
depends
on our understanding
of them."
 
-- Felix Frankfurter,
Associate Justice,
US Supreme Court,
reply
to counsel
who said
a challenge from the bench
was
"just a matter of semantics".
Reader's Digest,
June 1964
[SCQ p. 66]
 
+++
 
"The whole paraphernalia
of the criminal law
and the criminal courts
is based on the need
of the upper class
to keep the lower class
in its place."
 
-- David Frost and Antony Jay,
"The English", Avon, 1968
[SCQ p. 66]
 
+++
 
"Nobody wants
literate people
to go to prison --
they have
a distressing way
of revealing
what it's actually like
and destroying
our illusions
about training
and rehabilitation
with nasty stories
about sadism
and futility
and buckets of stale urine."
 
-- David Frost and Antony Jay,
"The English", Avon, 1968
[SCQ p. 66]
 
+++
 
"It may be true
that the law
cannot make a man
love me,
but it can keep him
from
lynching me,
and I think
that's pretty important."
 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Wall Street Journal,
November 13, 1962
[SCQ p. 67]
 
+++
 
"An individual
who breaks a law
that conscience tells him
is unjust,
and who
willingly accepts the penalty
of imprisonment
in order to arouse the conscience
of the community
over its injustice,
is in reality
expressing
the highest respect
for the law."
 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.,
"Why We Can't Wait",
Harper and Row, 1964
[SCQ p. 67]

+++
 
"[American liberty]
is premised
on the accountability
of free men and women
for what they have done,
not for what
they may do."
 
-- Jon Newman,
Judge, US Court of Appeals,
Second Circuit,
on unconstitutionality
of preventative detention,
quoted in editorial
"Fat Tony and the Bail Principle",
New York Times,
November 29, 1986
[SCQ p. 69]
 
+++
 
"Paramount
among the responsibilities
of a free press
is the duty
to prevent any part
of the government
from deceiving the people
and sending them off
to distant lands
to die
of foreign fevers
and foreign
shot and shell."
 
-- Hugo L. Black,
Associate Justice,
US Supreme Court,
concurring opinion
in 6-3 ruling
that upheld
the press's right
to publish
the Pentagon Papers,
June 30, 1971
[SCQ P. 73]
 
+++
 
"If the First Amendment
means anything,
it means
that a state has no business
telling a man,
sitting alone in his own house,
what books
he may read
or what films
he may watch."
 
-- Thurgood Marshall,
Associate Justice,
US Supreme Court,
unanimous opinion
that
the First Amendment
guarantees
the right to possess
in one's home
material
that might be regarded
as obscene
in public.
April 7, 1969
[SCQ p. 77]
 
+++
 
"Our whole
constitutional heritage
rebels
at the thought
of giving government
the power
to control
men's minds."
 
-- Thurgood Marshall,
Associate Justice,
US Supreme Court,
unanimous opinion
that
the First Amendment
guarantees
the right to possess
in one's home
material
that might be regarded
as obscene
in public.
April 7, 1969
[SCQ p. 77]
 
+++
 
"The Fourth Amendment
and the personal rights
it secures
have a long history.
 
At the very core
stands the right
of a man to retreat
into his own home
and there be free
from unreasonable
governmental
intrusion."
 
-- John Paul Stevens,
Associate Justice,
US Supreme Court,
unanimous opinion
that the Constitution
bars police
from electronic
eavesdropping.
March 5, 1961
[SCQ p. 79]
 
+++
 
"Our history shows
that the
death penalty
has been unjustly imposed,
innocents
have been killed by the state,
effective rehabilitation
has been impaired,
judicial administration
has suffered.
It is the poor,
the weak,
the ignorant,
the hated
who are executed
[and]
racial discrimination
occurs in the administration
of capital punishment."
 
-- Ramsey Clark,
US Attorney General,
urging abolishment
of the death penalty
for federal crimes,
to Senate Judiciary Committee,
New York Times,
July 3, 1968
[SCQ p. 84]
 
+++
 
"Men of faith
know that
throughout history
the crimes
committed in liberty's name
have been exceeded
only
by those
committed
in God's name."
 
-- Mills E. Godwin,
Governor of Virginia,
on the burning of crosses
by the Ku Klux Klan
members,
Quote, January 1, 1967
[SCQ p. 86]
 
+++
 
"These guys
commit their crimes
with a pencil
instead of a gun."
 
-- Mario Merola,
District Attorney,
Bronx, New York,
on corporate crime,
New York Times,
June 9, 1985
[SCQ p. 90]
 
+++
 
"Creativity
not committed to public purpose
is merely
therapy
or ego satisfaction."
 
-- Ernest A. Jones,
advertising executive,
address at
Cranbrook Academy of Art,
New York Herald Tribune,
June 2, 1964
[SCQ p. 97]
 
+++
 
"We have gone
completely overboard
on security.
 
Everything has to be
secured,
jobs,
wages,
hours --
although
the ultimate in security
is jail,
the slave labor camp
and
the salt mine."
 
-- Cola Parker,
President,
National Association
of Manufacturers,
news summaries,
December 9, 1955
[SCQ p. 98]
 
+++
 
"It is our job
to make women unhappy
with what they have."
 
-- B. Earl Puckett,
President,
Allied Stores Corporation,
recalled on his death,
Newsweek,
February 23, 1976
[SCQ p. 98]
 
+++
 
"The human being
who
would not harm you
on an individual,
face-to-face basis,
who is charitable,
civic-minded,
loving
and devout,
will wound
or kill you
from behind
the corporate veil."
 
-- Morton Mintz,
on the marketing
of a damaging
birth-control device,
"At Any Cost: Corporate Greed,
Women and the Dalkon Shield",
Pantheon Press, 1985
[SCQ p. 104]
 
+++
 
"They are
supplying
the legs
on which
this monster
walks."
 
-- Randall Robinson,
TransAfrica Lobby,
on U.S. firms
doing business
with South Africa,
Time, November 25, 1985
[SCQ  p. 105]
 
+++
 
"What the insurance companies
have done
is to reverse the business
so that the public at large
insures
the insurance companies."

-- Gerry Spence, trial lawyer,
Time, March 24, 1986
[SCQ p. 105]
 
+++

"Universities
should be safe havens
where
ruthless examination
of realities
will not be
distorted
by
the aim to please
or inhibited
by
the risk of displeasure."
 
-- Kingman Brewster,
President, Yale University,
inaugural address,
April 11, 1964
[SCQ p. 110]
 
+++
 
"We're drowning
in information
and starving
for knowledge."
 
-- Rutherford D. Rogers,
librarian, Yale University,
on the enormous number of books,
periodicals and other documents
published each year,
quoted in the New York Times,
February 25, 1985
[SCQ  p. 115]
 
+++
 
"We seek the truth
and will endure
the consequences."
 
-- Charles Seymour,
President, Yale University,
recalled on his death,
August 11, 1963
[SCQ p. 115]
 
+++
 
"[The word Liberal]
distinguishes
whatever nourishes
the mind and spirit
from the
training
which is merely
practical
or
professional
or
from the trivialities
which
are no training
at all."
 
-- Alan Simpson,
President, Vassar College,
address at the
One Hundredth Commencement,
May 31, 1964
[SCQ p. 115]
 
+++
  
"The shrewd guess,
the fertile hypothesis,
the courageous leap
to a tentative conclusion --
these are the most valuable coins
of the thinker
at work.
 
But in most schools
guessing
is heavily penalized
and is associated somehow
with laziness."
 
-- Jerome Bruner,
"The Process of Education",
Harvard, 1960
[SCQ p. 117]
 
+++
 
"Teachers
must think
for themselves
if they are to
help others
think for themselves."
 
-- Carnegie Corporation of New York,
on the establishment of a committee
to set teaching standards,
"A Nation Prepared", report
quoted in the New York Times,
May 16, 1986
[SCQ p. 117]
 
+++
 
"Education
is the ability
to listen
to almost anything
without losing
your temper
or
your self-confidence."
 
-- Robert Frost,
Reader's Digest,
April 1960
[SCQ p. 117]
 
+++
 
"Education
doesn't change life
much.
 
It just lifts trouble
to a higher plane
of regard."
 
-- Robert Frost,
Quote, July 9, 1961
[SCQ p. 118]
 
+++
 
"In the long course
of history,
having people who
understand your thought
is much greater security
than another
submarine."
 
-- J. William Fulbright,
US Senator,
on rationale for establishing
the Fulbright scholarships,
New York Times,
June 26, 1986
[SCQ p. 118]
 
+++
 
"Libraries
keep the records
on behalf
of all humanity ...
the unique
and the absurd,
the wise
and [the]
fragments
of stupidity."
 
-- Vartan Gregorian,
President, New York Public Library,
New Yorker, April 14, 1986
[SCQ p. 118]
 
+++
 
"To be able
to be caught up
into the world
of thought --
that
is educated."
 
-- Edith Hamilton,
Saturday Evening Post,
September 27, 1958
[SCQ p. 118]
 
++++

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