Quotes About Liberty

El fin de la ley no es abolir o restringir, sino preservar y ampliar la libertad. Para todos los estados de seres creados, capaces de derecho, donde no hay ley, no hay libertad.

Por ser cada hombre, según se mostró, naturalmente libre, sin que nada alcance a ponerle en sujeción, bajo ningún poder de la tierra, como no sea su propio consentimiento

Freedom, then, is not what sir Robert Filmer tells us, O.A. 55, " a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws :" but freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of the society

for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one

If kings, who are not heirs to Adam, have no right to sovereignty, we are all free

el disfrute de bienes en ese estado es muy inestable, en zozobra. Ello le hace desear el abandono de una condición que, aunque libre, llena está de temores y continuados peligros; y no sin razón busca y se une en sociedad con otros ya reunidos, o afanosos de hacerlo para esa mutua preservación de sus vidas, libertades y haciendas, a que doy el nombre general de propiedad.

that, however it may be mistaken, the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom:

where there is no law, there is no freedom;

but freedom is not, as we are told, " a liberty for every man to do what he lists:" (for who could be free, when every other man's humour might domineer over him ?) but a liberty to dispose and order as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.

God left all men free; Nature has made no man a slave.' (Anonymous, in Rhetorica Aristotelis, CAG XXI: 2, p. 74 Rabe) This, remarkably, is the only surviving testimony to what must have been a fairly widespread sophistic thesis, that slavery is contrary to nature (referred to disapprovingly by Aristotle at Politics 1253b20ff.).

Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq, a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice.

Yet those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it, live a half-life, having indulged their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect…. Sacrifice for a cause greater than your self-interest, and you invest your lives with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.

As long as I am an American citizen and American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.

It is not for you, happy you, who live with liberty, live as free to indulge as to form your wishes, I say it is not for you to find tongues in the wind. It is for the imprisoned Sibella to feed on such illusions, to waft herself on the pinions of fancy beyond Mr. Valmont's barriers, within which, for the two last years, her fetters have been insupportable:—for two years, except when she saw you, has she been joyless.

Only it is right to bear in mind one fact, that, admitting the lawfulness of the coup d'état, you must not object to the dictatorship. And, admitting the temporary necessity of the dictatorship, it is absolute folly to expect under it the liberty and ease of a regular government.

I would have the government educate the people absolutely, and then give room for the individual to develop himself into life freely. Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass.

Since then the tree of liberty has come down with a crash and we have had another festa as noisy on that occasion. Revolution and counter-revolution, Guerazzi and Leopold, sacking of Florence and entrance of the Austrian army — we live through everything, you see, and baby grows fat indiscriminately.

It's an auspicious night for the overthrow of regimes.

The Freeporters were violently oppressed to social controls of all sorts. Even-especially?-healthy ones.

What is it exactly," she asked, "that they mean by freedom? What does it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.

Our national problem has not been ignoring the Civil War, but turning it into a kind of theme park in which nostalgia and mendacity have eclipsed the raw and unpleasant truth that one army fought, and lost, a battle for the liberty to enslave other human beings, while the other, full of imperfect men fighting for a variety of motives, secured the emancipation of those human beings and thereby preserved a political experiment underwritten by the idea of equality.

The very idea of freedom incites fear in the hearts of terrorists across the world.