Quotes About Freedom

Liberty depends on self-restraint. Freedom is freedom only when controlled and limited.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone.

The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings.

I am for the woods against the world,But are the woods for me?

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.

People never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man.

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

Deny them [the colonies] this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.

Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny.

The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

God's purpose was not simply to deliver Israel from Pharoah's yoke. It was to bring them under His yoke.

Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.

What more felicity can fall to creature, than to enjoy delight with liberty.

Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country, it is always to liberate somebody.

In the arts as in the sciences a certain freedom for experimentation is necessary: one must allow a good deal of apparently gratuitous, and even empty or ridiculous work, if one wants to get masterpieces.

If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security!

The greatest gift a writer can give himself is permission to write badly.