Why then should I give my Readers bad Lines of my own, when good Ones of other People’s are so plenty? ‘Tis methinks a poor Excuse for the bad Entertainment of Guests, that the Food we set before them, tho’ coarse and ordinary, is of one’s own Raising, off one’s own Plantation, &c. when there is Plenty of what is ten times better, to be had in the Market. — On the contrary, I assure ye, my Friends, that I have procur’d the best I could for ye, and much Good may’t do ye.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) American statesman, scientist, philosopher, aphorist
Poor Richard (1747 ed.)
(Source)
On his (uncredited) borrowing of poetry and aphorisms from others for his almanac.
Quotations about:
infringement
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It is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
On Liberty, ch. 4 “Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual” (1859)
(Source)
Do the people of this land — in the providence of God, favored, as they sometimes boast, above all others in the plenitude of their liberties — desire to preserve those so carefully protected by the First Amendment: liberty of religious worship, freedom of speech and of the press, and the right as freemen peaceably to assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances? If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.
George Sutherland (1862-1942) Anglo-American jurist, Supreme Court Justice (1922-1938)
Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 301 U.S. 141 (1938) [Dissent]
