Quotes About Liberty

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one's happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It's only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen -­ that is what makes the crucial difference.

Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition.

The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition. Even in my feeble mental state, I knew that any hope for survival hinged upon my ability to break free from the windowless cubicle inside my head. But breaking free meant letting go - a skill that required guts - and guts were visceral assets of which I believed I was 99 percent void

Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition.

The only rule is there's only one rule: no rules.

Jail ain't for nobody.

What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

Freedom means everything to me. It is the most essential right that every person deserves. Most people take it for granted, but not North Koreans.

I'm not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

The common Notions of Liberty are not from School Divines, but from Nature.

Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.

Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.

La lectura es libertad y el lector, al leer, reinventa aquello mismo que lee; participa así en la creación universal.

I have known many of those pretended champions for liberty in my time, yet do I not remember one that was not in his heart and in his family a tyrant.

Americans don't fight for gold or oil or colonial conquest; we fight for an idea—liberty.

Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.

Evet, bana göre buras?, yani doÄŸu, karanl???n ve köleliÄŸin ülkesidir. Bundan ne demek istediÄŸimi anlatm??t?m. Bundan burada insanlar?n özgür olmad???n?, biraz metafizik bir dille söylersek, burada ruhlar?n tutsak olduÄŸunu söylemek istiyorum.

Today, one of the brothers asked me: Is it a terrible prison, not to be able to move from the place where you're standing? You answered... I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act. You who speak languages, you are such liars.

Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. And now, like Russia, I can set aside those burdens for a little while and see what happens.

Una esclava que se alegra es una esclava de todas formas.

Quando le parole perdono di senso, i popoli perdono la loro libertà.