Quotes About Liberty

Girls brought up as you were, in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined.

In these times, liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going its rounds again.

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

President Bush in his inaugural address talked about bringing freedom to countries that don't have it. He didn't specify how.

Desconfio que é tão fácil ser infeliz num lugar grande quanto num pequeno, ou sentir-se acorrentada quando se tem a bênção de mil liberdades. Para uma criatura de asas, sentir-se presa à terra; para um pássaro, não perceber que a porta da gaiola está aberta.

Free must be like a whippoorwill that could fly here and there and settle where it pleased... free could mean to get paid for your work like white folks... free was like the free black boy who... gave her water... if you were free, you wouldn't be whipped." (58)

It had ceased to bother me that Michele didn't believe a word that I said. It gave me the liberty to lie whenever I chose.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

John Quincy Adams' dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, "there will be America's heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

The idea of a census was considered an intolerable intrusion. Providing information to "place-men and taxmasters," it was denounced by a Member of Parliament in 1753 as "totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty." If any officer should demand information about his household and family he would refuse it and if the officer persisted he would have him thrown into the horsepond.

If there be an axiom evident to all, it is this, that liberty is a first necessity of existence.

Liberty acting without motive is no more liberty, it is chance, and chance is another name for ignorance.

God wills man to be free, but the emancipation of himself is in man's own hands.

Freedom consists in the exercise of the will in overthrowing every opposition which restrains the development of the nature of the creature.

I have no intention of arguing for liberty, because I believe it to be an irrational verity, one which must be assumed, and which can never be demonstrated. Every one, the veriest sceptic included, believes in liberty, and believes in it naturally and invincibly. He cannot emancipate himself from the belief that he has a power of option between two courses of action, though he may have created a system in which he has demonstrated that liberty is impossible.

Interference with personal liberty for opinions is immoral, for every man has a right to his own opinions and a right to express them; and interference with the liberty of A is only lawful when A has violated the rights of B, and then one interference must exactly balance the other. When an idea takes the knife like Lady Macbeth, it has on its hands a dye which all the perfumes of Araby cannot efface. It has defied morality, and, as its penalty, morality delivers it over to impotence.

The liberty of the creature is at once alienable and inalienable; alienable because it depends on the will of the creature, and inalienable because it is absolutely willed by the Creator. It is alienable in fact, but inalienable by right. Natural right is the will of God, as it expresses itself in the essence of our reason, which is His workmanship. And as God alone is absolute, no pretended positive has any authority to contravene a natural right proceeding from Him.

When the creature takes full possession of the liberty it has received it becomes a person.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

I have little interest in streamlining the government or in making it more efficient, for I intend to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.

Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man's liberty. Government represents power in the hands of some men to control and regulate the lives of other men. And power, as Lord Acton said, corrupts men. "Absolute power," he added, "corrupts absolutely.