Quotes About Liberty

Any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it just to stand one minute on God's earth a free woman.

All the best stories in the world were of escape.

Free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others.

people, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side

Thus, the struggle for peace includes the struggle for freedom and justice for the masses of all countries.

An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.

Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers.

We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong

The Prince. Some would insist that the book was inspired by the devil.25 But Machiavelli was only a close student of Aristotle's version of civic liberty, which led him in the wake of Savonarola's fall to ask some uncomfortable questions. What if God really didn't care whether Florence survived as a republic or not? What if God didn't really care whether men lived as free men or slaves? And what if human nature suits us as much for servitude as it does for liberty?

crucial for understanding that more celebrated book. For in writing the Discourses, Machiavelli discovered a basic paradox: When it comes to liberty, nothing fails like success.

liberty. "All politeness is owing to Liberty," he wrote. "We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men's Understanding. 'Tis a destroying of Civility, Good Breeding, and even Charity itself. . . ." Shaftesbury

Man has freedom to do all he wills," Spencer wrote, "provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man.

If freedom in terms of political liberty was proving to be a dead end in Italy and elsewhere, Plato offered a different path to freedom: freedom through the creative spirit.

He is Europe's first liberal in the classic sense: a believer in maximizing personal liberty in the social, economic, and intellectual spheres, as well as the political. But the ultimate goal of this liberty was, we should remember, happiness—which Hutcheson always defined as resulting from helping others to be happy.

he explained why American leadership was essential to the world. Wilson began by asserting that the Founding Fathers had set up their new nation in the hope that it would "show mankind the way to liberty.

As in old Edinburgh, drink opened the doors for free intellectual exchange. The

This world offers a form of liberty—the freedom to pursue one's own self-interest—and a form of authority: the power of the magistrate "to punish transgressors, to correct fraud and violence, and to oblige men, however reluctant, to consult their own real and permanent [long-term] interests.

In short, a democracy like Athens or a republic like Florence was a cooperative partnership, in which men agree to be the best they can be in both their public and their private lives, instead of (as in Plato's Republic) having those rules imposed from above. Only under liberty could men realize their true nature as human beings both as free individuals and as part of a greater whole.

This was why the ancient Athenians had defied the tyranny of Persia against all odds. This was why the early Romans had risked everything to overthrow their kings, so that they could live free or die. And that was why the Florentines had to be ready to die to defend their liberty, Leonardo Bruni concluded—because without liberty, "life [has] no meaning for them.

All this creative outflow—the product of a post-1402 generation of Florentines eager to celebrate their political liberty and its unleashing of human potential—we call the Renaissance. Thanks to the Florentines' reading of Aristotle, a new way of seeing the world had been born, and with it a new appreciation of civic freedom.

it was believed, liberty opens the door to a standard of excellence in both public and private affairs unknown to those living in servitude or unfree societies. In short, a republic built on Aristotle's model will allow men to achieve their highest potential not only as political animals, but as complete moral beings.

Politics in modern society, then, must involve a tension between two conflicting, but complementary principles: liberty, which preserves individuals, and authority, which preserves society.

To Boethius, Augustine's "Christian liberty" grated against more ancient ideals of liberty. For one thing, it seemed to strip men of the power of free will.7 If we are going to be happy, we have to be free to act in the world, even if that means we make mistakes.

Hobbes puts the blame squarely on Aristotle, who he said led men to connect liberty with democracy and goaded them into "loving tumults" and disorder, believing those were the way to secure liberty when they did just the opposite. Instead, Hobbes argued, nothing was safe unless we obey the sovereign;