quotations about liberty
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
The premise of laissez-faire is the premise of individual rights. It is the premise that your life and your property belong to you, not to the collective. To those of us who hold this view, a proper foreign policy achieves the same fundamental purpose as a proper economic-social policy: the safeguarding of our liberty. When individuals engage in voluntary, peaceful action, the government acknowledges their right to do so and refrains from forcibly intervening. But when a foreign entity subjects us to non-voluntary, non-peaceful action, the government forcibly intervenes, in self-defense, to repel that threat to our rights. That is, the state refuses to initiate force against the innocent, but willingly uses force in retaliation against those who initiate it (or threaten to). This is how our freedom is sustained.
PETER SCHWARTZ
"Libertarianism vs. Liberty", Huffington Post, June 27, 2015
There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, Apr. 24, 1881
The basis of a democratic state is liberty.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Oh! if there be, on this earthly sphere,
A boon, an offering Heaven holds dear,
'Tis the last libation Liberty draws
From the heart that bleeds and breaks in her cause!
THOMAS MOORE
"Lalla Rookh", The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore
It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Le Deuxieme Sexe
Liberty has as many chains as an iron-monger's shop, and as rusty.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
United States: the country where liberty is a statue.
NICANOR PARRA
Artefactos
The cause of liberty is one and the same all over the world.
GEORGE THOMPSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty.
MAHATMA GANDHI
The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi
True liberty consists in the privilege of enjoying our own rights, not in the destruction of the rights of others.
PINCHARD
attributed, Encyclopaedia of Quotations: A Treasury of Wisdom, Wit and Humor, Odd Comparisons and Proverbs
This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Valley Forge
It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regards as the public good.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
The Constitution of Liberty
He that has his chains knocked off, and the prison doors set open to him, is perfectly at liberty, because he may either go or stay, as he best likes; though his preference be determined to stay, by the darkness of the night, or illness of the weather, or want of other lodging.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to Abigail Adams, Jul. 17, 1775
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Unguarded Gates"