Quotes About Liberty

It is forgiveness that sets a man working for God. He does not work in order to be forgiven, but because he has been forgiven, and the consciousness of his sin being pardoned makes him long for its entire removal than ever he did before. An unforgiven man cannot work. He has not the will, nor the power, nor the liberty. He is in chains. Israel in Egypt could not serve Jehovah. "Let my people go, that they may serve Me." was God's message to Pharaoh (exodus 8:1) first liberty, then service.

One way to describe the American Dream is as a promise—a promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Inherent to that pursuit, I believe, is having access to opportunities like education and good jobs, healthcare and ownership, support from family and friends, and generosity from strangers. Opportunity shows up as luck, but is also embedded into our social, governmental, and corporate constructs.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic. Thus there have ever been, and will ever be, men who, after having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from its influence, and to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience.

Who can be 'agents unto themselves' if they are in bondage to others and have to accept their terms?

The genius of stable societies is that they achieve stability without stagnation, repetition without monotony, conformity with originality, obedience with liberty.

There is none of you who would not publicly exclaim that everyone should be moderator and arbitrator in his own matter, who would not command all citizens to use rivers and public places equally and indifferently, who would not with all his power defend the liberty of going hither and thither and trading.

Again, it is a new doctrine of constitutional law that one indicted for disobedience to an unconstitutional statute may not defend on the ground of the invalidity of the statute, but must obey it though he knows it is no law, and, after he has suffered the disgrace of conviction and lost his liberty by sentence, then, and not before, seek, from within prison walls, to test the validity of the law.

The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government--one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us.

The liberty of every American citizen freely to come and to go must frequently, in the face of sudden danger, be temporarily limited or suspended. The civil authorities must often resort to the expedient of excluding citizens temporarily from a locality.

An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.

Our new way of life is outside of the law of sin and death because inside and out I am hid in Christ. I live in the law of liberty which has made me free.

Most importantly, nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.

If you ask me to summarise our mission, I would put it this way: We were a military regime that sought to lay the foundations for freedom and liberty in a complex society.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem to me that notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservation of our rights.

To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,... of searching and experimenting,... of saying No to any authority — literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political.

The word Liberty circled the world and returned amazed.

To be happy is to have freedom.

To have knowledge is to have freedom.

You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it.

liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.

It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.

Only to those who have been in prison does freedom have such a great meaning.