Quotes About Liberty

The red and white and starry blue Is freedom's shield and hope.

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever." (Thomas Jefferson)

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.

Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation.

Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, till not a slave shall on this earth be found.

Let us not be unmindful that liberty is power: that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must, in proportion to its numbers, be the most powerful nation on earth, and that the tenure of power by man is, in the moral purpose of his Creator, upon condition that it shall be exercised to ends of beneficence, to improve the condition of himself and his fellow men.

Por donde sea que el estandarte de la libertad y la independencia se haya desplegado o se vaya a desplegar, ahí estarán su corazón, sus bendiciones y sus plegarias. Pero no irán a ultramar en busca de monstruos que destruir. Desearán la libertad y la independencia de todos, pero sólo serán paladines y justificadores de sí mismos.

The principle of liberty and equality, if coupled with mere selfishness, will make men only devils, each trying to be independent that he may fight only for his own interest. And here is the need of religion and its power, to bring in the principle of benevolence and love to men.

I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality.

The limitation of liberty is justified only when it is necessary for liberty itself, to prevent an invasion of freedom that would be still worse.

Individual liberty is the whole purpose of political life, and I thought it was threatened then [in 1964 becoming politically engaged at age 15] and I think it's threatened now.

What's needed in this next campaign is to say, with clarity, why a pro-individual-liberty, small-government perspective is what most Americans really want.

The Light of Liberty is all-consuming because it is the natural way of the soul. It is the highest form of Love."

We have forgotten what Thomas Jefferson told us in 1776: that we are endowed by the Creator "with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Not happiness, mind you, but its pursuit. By implication Jefferson warned that if you pursue happiness for someone else, you deny him the right to pursue it on his own.

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—'Thou mayest'— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if 'Thou mayest'—it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.

Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.

Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?

Life is fairer when individuals are free to make their own decisions

Good government has to mean less government.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called.

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.

And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.