Quotes About Liberty

Benjamin Franklin put it like this: 'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Don't bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution. Once each of us recognizes our own freedom and our own responsibility, then the chains that bind us will fall away.

If you're not very careful, your creative business, the very thing which you hoped would lead to liberty and riches, will instead trap you in a hell of hard-working poverty.

Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.

in 1788, he had become infatuated by the American republic and its spirit of "simplicity, goodness, and that dignity of man which is the possession of those who realize their liberty and who see in their fellow men only brothers and equals." Brissot had determined to bring the American ideals to Europe.

It is more important to be free than to be happy.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.

To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.

Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity.

It's more important to be free than to be happy.

There's just one thing in this life that's better than happiness and that's freedom. It's more important to be free than to be happy.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.

For you, freedom means leave me alone. For the masses, it means give me a break.

Los sentimientos son libres pero rara vez los hombres se atreven a obedecer esa libertad. Me

I'd prefer to have dangerous freedom, than have peaceful slavery

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.

llegar a un lugar donde pudieses amar lo que se te antojara —donde no necesitaras permiso para desear— era la libertad.

Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state bailouts for investment banks 'too big to fail', tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?

If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most 'freedom-loving' societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitations—and we always do—why not others? Why

they were increasingly perceived as restrictions upon the self-expression and freedom of the individual.

Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.

It's your life. Do what you want with it.