Quotes About Liberty

Crime, particularly among the poor and downtrodden, is often a last gesture of liberty.

The mere existence of alternatives is not . . . enough to make my action free.

Er bestaat geen noodzakelijk verband tussen individuele vrijheid en democratie.

Berlin llamó simple charlatanería a esta proposición. Si la libertad positiva es un ideal válido, entonces, ¿qué defensa hay contra la afirmación marxista de que el Estado tiene el derecho de infligir terribles castigos a quienes se oponen a su poder de obligar a las personas a actuar contra lo que desean hacer, puesto que deben contribuir al bienestar de la masa de la población?

For Rousseau), the ancient conflict (between liberty and authority) is to be resolved by breeding a race of men who will choose absolutely freely only that which is absolutely right.... there would be no conflict, no agony, no choice.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

You are a gypsy, so you think it is only the freedom to move from place to place. Real freedom is a thing no one can take from you, because it is of the spirit. I keep it here. He tapped his head. [ Chapter 9, page 87]

Only free men can change their minds and be surprised; and while no men are completely free, some are freer than others.

Did you read where the great-grandson of Nathan Hale got married this weekend? Give me liberty or give me death. That's what the groom will be saying in about one month.

The freedom to talk with God and of God is being opened by God's joy. It cannot be forced. For true awareness cannot be coercive; it does not come about by either authoritarian pressure or the force of logic. It presupposes liberty. Being aware of God is an art and--if the term may be permitted--a noble game.

If liberty is to be preserved against the materialistic paternalism of the modern state, there must be something more than courts and legal guarantees; freedom must be written not merely in the constitution but in the people's heart. And it can be written in the heart, we believe, only as a result of the redeeming work of Christ. Other means in the long run will fail.

Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them then to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.

No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!

China has to go along with world trends. That's democracy, liberty, individual freedom. China sooner or later has to go that way. It cannot go backward.

There is now a false idealism of turning Government into God, by a vague notion that it gives everything to everybody; to the denial of the liberty given by God, which is called life. . . .

Increasingly I perceived myself as being neither on the left nor the right but as believing in a distinct "third position," mistrustful of big government of whatever political hue, which I perceived in the Orwellian sense as being Big Brother, the crusher of freedom.

Changing the theology, changing the rules, does not bring freedom. Only truth brings freedom. And

He would be an educational exhibit. People wouldn't learn much about the anatomy from him but they would learn all there was to know about war. That would be a great thing to concentrate war into one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that's in the newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere a war between man and a high explosive shell.

If there could be a next time and somebody said let's fight for liberty he would say mister my life is important. I'm not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I've got to know in advance what liberty is and whose idea of liberty we're talking about and just how much of that liberty we're going to have.

A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?

And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow?

Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me I don't care for some.

A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?