Quotes About Freedom

He cleared his throat. "One good thing about the range, Starling, is there's no politics out there." "No?" "You were right to secure that garage up at Baltimore there. You worried about the TV?

Good," Mapp said. "That's very good. Eat some crabs. Grab Pilcher and smooch him on his face, go wild.

On the first day his pennant flew from the completed towers, he assembled the prisoners in the kitchen garden, and, mounting his gallows to address them, he released the men to go home, just as he had promised. Many elected to stay in his service, owing to the quality of the provender.

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bonds, society perishes.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.

Mrs. Rule wants to be free of financial worry before her sixty-fifth birthday. Each time she tabulates, she tells herself she is reducing her fear of never being able to retire in comfort.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. { Letter to celebrated scientist Alexander von Humboldt , 6 December, 1813 }

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government...

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.

I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and opressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

The only security of all is in a free press.

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it. [First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801]

no people can be both ignorant and free.

Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.