quotations about liberty
The spirit of liberty must be cherished, if we would elevate, purify, and strengthen the fibre of the nation.
ARNAUD DE L'ARIEGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 1938
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Antiquity
It seemed to me much more than the mere question whether the negro should remain in slavery; that it really involved the question whether liberty should be strangled on the continent dedicated to liberty.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
What is so beneficial to the people as liberty, which we see not only to be greedily sought after by men, but also by beasts, and to be preferred to all things.
CICERO
attributed, Day's Collacon
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
GIDEON J. TUCKER
Final Accounting in the Estate of A. B.
The spontaneous action of the people themselves alone can create liberty.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
MARY MCCARTHY
The Contagion of Ideas
We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.
JAMES MADISON
attributed, Quote Junkie Presidents Edition
The idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.
GEORGE ORWELL
"Notes on Nationalism"
Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
Critical and Historical Essays
Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery
An armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics ... without standing armies their liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe.
JAMES MADISON
First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1809
Then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from Heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Starship Troopers
If to break loose from the bounds of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worst, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.
ISAIAH BERLIN
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
U. S. Declaration of Independence, Jul. 4, 1776
Our individual liberty is the very essence of America. It is what makes America unique. If you aren't free to protect yourself--when government puts its thumb on that freedom--then you aren't free at all.
WAYNE LAPIERRE
speech, March 15, 2013