Quotes About Freedom

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both. You

All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. The cynic who decides that there is no truth is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. The

Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of "eternal vigilance" would have thought so. The

James Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises "on some favorable emergency.

that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

where annual elections end, tyranny begins.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

Timothy Snyder

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom

One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice.

Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark

Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

a man can be human only under human conditions." The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal.

Beware the one-party state.

In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like. Communists required all such groups to be officially registered and transformed them into institutions of control.

to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

The choice to be public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual- and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.