Quotes About Liberty

That's why Thomas Jefferson didn't write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon.

These three elements—America's philosophy of reason, equality, liberty, and limited government; America's culture of individual rights and social duties; and America's shared history—define our country.

The notion of all men having equal freedom and independence sprang originally from the Biblical notion of man being made in God's image, admixed with the Greek tradition of individual reason, and passed down generation after generation, transmuted over time into the understanding that not only are human beings made in God's image with will and reason, but with the liberty to exercise that will and reason in accordance with the pursuit of virtue.

In fact, the real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.

We had a rock to defend, and we defended it. And the name of that rock is Liberty, and in that name I speak.

For Liberty can be lost by the practical men whose hearts are too shrunken to contain it. Liberty can be bartered away by the greedy minds who cannot see beyond their own day. Liberty can be stolen away by the robber and the brute. But Liberty grows like grass in the hearts of the common people, from the blood of their martyrs. And the tyrants rage and are gone, but the dream and the deed endure.

I call the brave to the battle-line, I call the sane to the council -- I call the free millions of earth to the century ahead -- the century of the common man, established by you, the people. For this world cannot endure, half slave and half free.

The truth is that men are tired of liberty.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

Political liberty involves every citizen without exception in the examination and study of his most sacred interest. It aggrandizes the spirit, ennobles the mind, and establishes among all of them a sort of intellectual quality which makes for a people who are both glorious and powerful.

We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose this battle.

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security

Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.

The sun of liberty is set; you must light up the candle of industry and economy.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Where liberty dwells, there is my country.

A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district - all studied and appreciated as they merit - are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty.

A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

Think what you do when you run into debt; you give another power over your liberty.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

Security without liberty is called prison.