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Quotes of the Day for 12 June 2004 - Freedom

On this day in 1776 the Colony of Virginia adopted a Declaration of Rights as a prefix to its constitution, the first time such an enumeration became part of a government's enabling document. Adopted three weeks before Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and fourteen years before the Bill of Rights, the draft by George Mason is a milestone in freedom. I've got far more freedom quotes than I can possibly use on the 4th of July, so here are some extras.

A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
     - Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867 - 1959

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.
     - Frederick Douglass, 1817 - 1895

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
     - George Washington, 1732 - 1799

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
     - Henry Louis Mencken, 1880 - 1956

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be.
     - James Arthur Baldwin, 1924 - 1987

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
     - Marshall Lumsden

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