quotations about liberty
If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.
G. S. HILLARD
attributed, Day's Collacon
For liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands.
JOHN MILTON
The History of Britain
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
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
address on West India Emancipation, Aug. 4, 1857
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
WOODROW WILSON
speech at New York Press Club, Sep. 9, 1912
The whole notion, the whole concept of individual liberty is gone. The whole concept of limited government is gone. The whole concept of the Bill of Rights, the whole concept that the purpose of the Constitution is to limit the government, not limit the people. If you're on the verge of thinking we're losing that, then to me, that's it. That's ballgame. That's nutshell.
RUSH LIMBAUGH
The Rush Limbaugh Show, May 5, 2016
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to W.S. Smith, Nov. 13, 1787
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
KHALIL GIBRAN
The Vision
Still today, 70 years after our country emerged from the shadows of World War II, individual liberty is disproportionately attained and withheld across our communities. We must be aware of the ways, overt or subtle, that those with power systematically marginalize and devalue those without.
OMAR PADILLA & ROB BARRON
"Why Latinos are fighting for one another", The Des Moines Register, June 13, 2016
Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality; an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. If the substance in which this quality, attribute, adjective, call it what you will, exists, has a moral sense, a conscience, a moral faculty; if it can distinguish between moral good and moral evil, and has power to choose the former and refuse the latter, it can, if it will, choose the evil and reject the good, as we see in experience it very often does.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to John Taylor, 1814
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Antiquity
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
SALLUST
Histories
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
LEARNED HAND
speech in Central Park, New York, "The Spirit of Liberty", May 21, 1944
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Archibald Stewart, Dec. 23, 1791
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
GEORGE ORWELL
preface, Animal Farm
Liberty has restraints but no frontiers.
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
speech at Aberystwyth, Aug. 3, 1928
Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds -- but with that word realized -- with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
speech at the trial of C. B. Reynolds for blasphemy, May 1887
Individual liberty is the building block of a free society.
WHITNEY NEAL
"Igniting a passion for liberty through classroom engagement", Washington Times, September 8, 2015
Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew.
KENNETH W. ROYCE
Boston's Gun Bible