Quotes About Liberty

Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us.

What if citizens organized to demand what the Declaration of Independence promised: a government that protected the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This would call for an economic system that distributed wealth in a thoughtful and humane way. It would mean a culture where young people were not taught to seek success as a mask for greed. Throughout

We're coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree; We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master.

The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man's rights — namely, liberty.

He would never forget the feeling of that first year, the sense of freedom just being on his own gave him. He had his own room for the first time, his own money to spend as he wanted, his own food to buy and places to go and decisions to make; it was glorious, sublime.

Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest.

Freedom of speech carries the responsibility of thought. And we don't think. For all our gushing about living in a country dedicated to the proposition that everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we don't respect life, we don't understand liberty, and we have a perverted sense of happiness.

She's come to you this time of her own accord, and crossed our threshold of her own free will. May she always be free, just as she is today.

People must make their own choices, no matter how wrong those choices are. Otherwise they can't be free.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

We've shown the world that New York can never be defeated, because of its dynamic and diverse population and because it embodies the spirit of enterprise and the love of liberty. And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Independence is a heady draught, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It does not matter that its taste is not always appealing. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.

When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was the primary object.

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.

Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.

During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable.

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.

Collective action remains the best way of renewing the march towards the great trinity of liberty, equality, and solidarity.

I shall not remind you, Citizen-Directors, of all I have done for the triumph of liberty, the prosperity of St. Domingo, the glory of the French Republic; nor will I protest to you my attachment to our mother country, to my duties; my respect to the constitution, to the laws of the Republic, and my submission to the government.

America, 5 years after this brutal attack, is testament that a Nation conceived in liberty and equality will endure. It is a triumph of millions of Americans but it is also the triumph of an idea larger than any one person, larger than any one nation.

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.