quotations about liberty
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
LOUIS BRANDEIS
Olmstead v. United States
Liberty is equally desirable to the good and to the bad, to the brave and to the dastardly.
JOHN MAIR
An Introduction to Latin Syntax
There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity--those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price.
TERRY GOODKIND
Faith of the Fallen
The most exquisite dynamic is achieved when the common good is served while individual liberty is protected. No kings, no dictators. Us, in charge of ourselves, leveraging our resources behind our highest hopes, while protecting each other's freedoms, shaping our country, forever working to form "a more perfect union".
WENDELL POTTER & NICK PENNIMAN
Nation on the Take
The love of liberty is a common blood that flows in our American veins.
JIMMY CARTER
Farewell Address, Jan. 14, 1981
Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.
EDMUND BURKE
letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, Apr. 3, 1777
Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty? I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.
PATRICK HENRY
speech before the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Jun. 5, 1788
For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
THOMAS PAINE
The Crisis
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
THOMAS PAINE
First Principles of Government
Establish liberty on a rock of brass.
MAXIMILIEN DE ROBESPIERRE
report of the 18 Pluvoise, Year II
Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
general orders, Jul. 2, 1776
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.
JAMES MADISON
letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798
If liberty were to go on a pilgrimage all over the earth, she would find a home in every house, and a welcome in every heart.
WILLIAM ELDER
attributed, Day's Collacon
If there is one subject in this world worthy of being discussed, worthy of being understood, it is the question of intellectual liberty. Without that, we are simply painted clay.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
speech at the trial of C. B. Reynolds for blasphemy, May 1887
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty--of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
SUSAN SONTAG
Aids and Its Metaphors
Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J. J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each -- an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being -- they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'etat"
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body; without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
LORD BOLINGBROKE
The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke