1052 – “As the United States is the freest of all nations, so, too, its people sympathize with all people struggling for liberty and self-government; but while so sympathizing it is due to our honor that we should abstain from enforcing our views upon unwilling nations and from taking an interested part, without invitation, in the quarrels between different nations or between governments and their subjects. Our course should always be in conformity with strict justice and law, international and local.”

-Ulysses S Grant, 18ht President of the United States of America

905 – “By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free. My Nation’s journey toward justice has not been easy, and it is not over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end with slavery or with segregation. And many of the issues that still trouble America have roots in the bitter experience of other times. But however long the journey, our destination is set: liberty and justice for all.”

-George W Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America

787 – “Liberty sets the mind free, fosters independence and unorthodox thinking and ideas. But it does not offer instant prosperity or happiness and wealth to everyone. This is something that politicians in particular must keep in mind.”

–Boris Yeltsin, 1st President of the Russian Federation

713 – “I affirm, therefore, that our present position is one of apostasy; and to give the ballot to the Negro will be no innovation, but a return to the old paths, a restoration of that spirit of liberty to which the sufferings and sacrifices of the Revolution gave birth.”

–James A Garfield, 20th President of the United States of America

656 – Eisenhower’s Kinship Among Nations Quote

“Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity of size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things — call them what you will — I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only to provisions that he trespass not upon similar rights of others….”

–Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States of America

29 years ago today, in 1989, Mauerfall began when East and West Berliners joined together and began dismantling the Berlin Wall, which would eventually lead to the fall of the Iron Curtain and preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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653 – Grover Cleveland’s Statue of Liberty Dedication

“We are not here today to bow before the representation of a fierce warlike god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement. We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister Republic thence, and joined with answering rays a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until Liberty enlightens the world.”

–Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President of the United States of America

Today is Election Day in the United States, and regardless of who you support it is important that you go vote. Don’t make excuses, as the fewer people who vote, the worse and more partisan our democratic republic becomes, so exercise the fundamental right and vote!

442 – Simple Truths Message

“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”

–Franklin D Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States of America

424 – “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”

–John Perry Barlow

232 – “Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.”

-William Lloyd Garrison [Attributed]