Quotes About Freedom

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.

The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrant. It is its natural manure.

The constitution of most of the states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed and that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press.

A little rebellion is good now and then.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. -Thomas Jefferson

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large...

It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

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.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.