Quotes About Liberty

the love of independence and possibilities

Je peux partir parce que j'ai une maison qui m'attend. Je peux rentrer parce que je suis libre de partir. C'est l'alternance qui donne toute sa saveur à chacun de ces modes de vies. C'est à la fois très ancien et très moderne. Nous avons besoin des deux.

Now I find my good men Are gathered in the night To wait in silence, not to sleep And the glorious word of liberty They whisper and murmur Till in unaccustomed strangeness On the steps of our temper Once again in delight they cry Freedom! Freedom!

We are people of peace. We are followers of the Christ who was and is the Prince of Peace. But there are times when we must stand up for right and decency, for freedom and civilization, just as Moroni rallied his people in his day to the defense of their wives, their children, and the cause of liberty.

Nevertheless, some Southerners like James Monroe still had serious reservations about the compromise, believing that assumption would reduce "the necessity for State taxation" and thus would "undoubtedly leave the national government more at liberty to exercise its powers and increase the subjects on which it will act.

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage; If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free; Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.

But freedom is not enough.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.

The exercise of liberty requires moral and intellectual virtues that oppose those habits fostered by the reigning economic, social, and cultural elites. The virtue most essential to liberty is self-control, yet the ruling principle behind egalitarianism, Hollywood-style hedonism, and unbridled materialism is the notion that one's appetites for pleasure and possessions should brook no limits.

But if I turn my back on a supposed communist, how do I know that I am not turning my back on the very concept of liberty that I am seeking to protect? Honest men can always get someone to defend them. But what does justice mean if apparently dishonest men can find no one?

There is no more painful bondage than to be at the mercy of one's inclinations; no greater liberty than utmost obedience to the Law of Being. And the Law is that the heart shall be purified, the mind regenerated, and the whole being brought in subjection to Love till self is dead and Love is all in all, for the reign of Law is the reign of Love.

Everything in life is about having as many options as possible so you can maximize your freedom.

Defining freedom in different ways (reducing expectations, increasing sources of income so no one source controls you).

Nothing ever works out when you are at the whims of others. It doesn't matter if you are an entrepreneur or an employee. Once someone is bribing you to do something (a salary is a form of bribery if you are only doing the work for the money and not for the meaning) then you become a prisoner.

Nothing is more unbearable, once has it, than freedom.

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says give me liberty, or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad n*****, so there won't be any more like him.

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection.

Without the right to defend yourself--and the right to possesss the means to do it--all other supposed rights are so much hot air.