Quotes About Liberty

I'm the most pro-liberty elected official statewide in my lifetime. It isn't even a close call, so for people who care about protecting liberty, there's never been - again, in my lifetime in Virginia - a statewide elected official who's been as aggressive and consistent about doing that as I have.

I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere. But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family - whether it's from an intruder or whether it's from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.

What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence, but as rights, of which government cannot deprive any portion of citizens, however small.

If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.

A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice.

At its core, our military is comprised of service members who are proud of their country and are willing to go to great lengths to protect American virtues of liberty and justice. I was one of them.

Visibility doesn't always equal freedom.

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom.

It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.

When colonists came to grips with their destiny, it was because they had realized liberty and responsibility go together.

True liberty consists exactly in self-determination in the direction of holiness. Man is never more free than when he moves consciously in the direction of God.

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by mean of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.

Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.

They [the makers of the Constitution] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

Those who won our independence... valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

We shall have lost something vital and beyond price on the day when the state denies us the right to resort to force...