Quotes About Liberty

We, the people. Manifest Destiny. Conceived in liberty. Fear itself. Ask not. Morning in America. United we stand. Yes, we can. In times of great change and tumult, presidents seek to inspire beleaguered Americans by reminding them of their national identity.

The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

If you like small government you need to work hard at having a strong national defense that is not so militant. Personal liberty is the purpose of government, to protect liberty - not to run your personal life, not to run the economy, and not to pretend that we can tell the world how they ought to live.

There is nothing wrong with describing Conservatism as protecting the Constitution, protecting all things that limit government. Government is the enemy of liberty. Government should be very restrained.

Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.

There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.

Having federal officials, whether judges, bureaucrats, or congressmen, impose a new definition of marriage on the people is an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty.

I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas.

Ron Paul states that if we are want to maintain what liberty we have left in our republic, millions, need to start taking to the streets in Peaceful protests. Dr. Paul believes in Resistance without violence.

The most basic principle to being a free American is the notion that we as individuals are responsible for our own lives and decisions. We do not have the right to rob our neighbors to make up for our mistakes, neither does our neighbor have any right to tell us how to live, so long as we aren't infringing on their rights. Freedom to make bad decisions is inherent in the freedom to make good ones. If we are only free to make good decisions, we are not really free.

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

Rights mean you have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor....I, in a way, don't like to use those terms: gay rights, women's rights, minority rights, religious rights. There's only one type of right. It's the right to your liberty.

Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.

Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

Failure of government programs prompts more determined effort, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away...whether is it is the war on poverty, drugs, terrorism...or the current Hitler of the day, an appeal to patriotism is used to convince the people that a little sacrifice of liberty, here or there, is a small price to pay...The results, though, are frightening and will soon become even more so.

And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time.

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

It is a dangerous notion that we need a government to protect us from ourselves.

When the goal of political action is no longer the defense of liberty, no word other than demagoguery can describe the despicable nature of politics.

It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind's history has been spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, various forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again. Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly desire peace and prosperity.

I don't want to run your life, I don't know how to run your life, I don't have the authority to run your life, and the Constitution doesn't permit me to run your life.

A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal thing; it is not collective. You don't gain liberty because you belong to a group. So we don't talk about women's rights or gay rights or anything else. Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally.

Freedom means not only that our economic activity ought to be free and voluntary, but that government should stay out of our personal affairs as well.