Quotes About Liberty

But there… that night… that moment, it was the first time I'd ever been cut free.

McCabe's Law Nobody has to do anything.

What's amazing is how, despite their love of liberty, Americans have embraced the massive restriction of private property rights that the separated city demands. Once a neighborhood is zoned and built, it gets frozen like a Polaroid from the day everyone moves in.

It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. The sense of justice dies slowly in a people. They grow used to the unthinkable, and sometimes they may look back and even wonder when things changed. They will not find a day or a time or a place. Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learn to ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.

A free society is most threatened not by uses of government that are obviously bad, but by uses of government that seem obviously good.

The genius of free human beings is that, given responsibility, they join together to take care of each other—to be their brothers' keepers when their brother needs help. The triumph of an earlier America was that it had set all the right trends in motion, at a time when the world was first coming out of millennia of poverty into an era of plenty. The tragedy of contemporary America is that it abandoned that course. Libertarians want to return to it.

This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it's the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.

Freedom is a system based on courage.

If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.

Giving up even an ounce of precious freedom is a very serious thing to do.

Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.

The greatest enemy of liberty is fear. When people feel comfortable and well protected, they are naturally expansive and tolerant of one another's opinions and rights. When they feel threatened, their tolerance shrinks.

The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be.

The only free man," he would say, "is one who doesn't work for anyone else.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

I am not a political man and I have no political convictions. I am an individual and a believer in liberty. That is all the politics I have.

Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.

SueÅ"a y serás libre en espiritu, lucha y serás libre en vida

There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity.

What's the point of getting people free only to put restrictions on them?

Let me be a free man - free to travel, free to stop, free to work.

Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself — and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.

What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from."