Quotes About Liberty

In every country where independence has taken the place of liberty, the first desire of a manly heart is to possess a weapon, which at once renders him capable of defence or attack, and, by rendering its owner terrible, often makes him feared.

he cursed his fellow-man who had snatched him from his joyous life to plunge him into a dungeon; he cursed his God who had let this happen; he cried aloud to whatever powers might be that could grant him revenge and liberty.

or la captivité partagée n'est plus qu'une demi-captivité

Thus Dantes, who but three months before had no desire but liberty, had now not liberty enough and panted for wealth. The cause was not in Dantes but in Providence who, whilst limiting the power of man, has filled him with boundless desires.

But excessive grief is like a storm at sea, where the frail bark is tossed from the depths to the top of the wave. Dantès recoiled from the idea of so infamous a death, and passed suddenly from despair to an ardent desire for life and liberty.

Dac? florile înseamn? libertate, relu? cu tristeÈ›e osânditul, atunci înseamn? c? libertatea o am, de vreme ce am florile.

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

Although men cannot become absolutely equal unless they be entirely free, and consequently equality, pushed to its furthest extent, may be confounded with freedom, yet there is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other.

So religion, which among the Americans never directly takes part in the government of society, must be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use of it.

Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science;

The Revolution in the United States was produced by a mature and thoughtful taste for liberty, and not by a vague and undefined instinct for independence.

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

Democracy extends the sphere of personal independence; socialism confines it. Democracy values each man at his highest; socialism makes of each man an agent, an instrument, a number. Democracy and socialism have but one thing in common—equality. But note well the difference. Democracy aims at equality in liberty. Socialism desires equality in constraint and in servitude.

Nothing is more repugnant to the human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to forms.

for a taste for variety is one of the characteristic passions of democracy.

the invention of fire-arms equalized the villein and the noble on the field of battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes;

Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny.

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

While he loved liberty, he detested the crimes that had been committed in its name. Jon J. Ingalls

December, 1865, of the celebrated 13th article or amendment of the Constitution, which declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude—except as a punishment for crime—shall exist within the United States.

to be a government of liberty regulated by law, with such results in the development of strength, in population, wealth, and military and commercial power, as no age had ever witnessed.

In the laws of Connecticut, as well as in all those of New England, we find the germ and gradual development of that township independence which is the life and mainspring of American liberty at the present day.