Quotes About Liberty

Freedom is the power to choose our own chains

True liberty is not the power to live as we please, but to live as we ought.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

Federalism isn't about states' rights. It's about dividing power to better protect individual liberty.

Liberty... is there only when there is no abuse of power.

If I were to give liberty to the press, my power could not last three days.

I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.

Irresponsible power is inconsistent with liberty, and must corrupt those who exercise it.

The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

The power to arrest - to deprive a citizen of liberty - must be used fairly, responsibly, and without bias.

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.

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.

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.

Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded.

What a perversion of the normal order of things! ... to make power the primary and central object of the social system, and Liberty but its satellite.

The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people's hands, that is, to give them the power at all times to defend it in the legislature and in the courts of justice.

The right to freedom being the gift of God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

A single legislature, on account of the superabundance of its power, and the uncontrolled rabidity of its execution, becomes as dangerous to the principles of liberty as that of a despotic monarch.