Quotes About Liberty

The birds never needed passports... We always thought, the birds can go wherever they want, and we couldn't, really. The birds were very much the symbol of... free movement for me.

I'm free to leave... go wherever I please, do whatever I want; I believe everyone should live like that. Don't be dependent on anyone else - man, woman, child, or dog.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.

I claim for Canada this, that in future Canada shall be at liberty to act or not act, to interfere or not interfere, to do just as she pleases, and that she shall reserve to herself the right to judge whether or not there is cause for her to act.

When I was a boy, the priest, my uncle, carefully inculcated upon me this proverb, which I then learned and have ever since kept in my mind: 'Dico tibi verum, Libertas optima rerum; Nunquam servili, sub nexu vivito, fili.' 'I tell you a truth: Liberty is the best of things, my son; never live under any slavish bond.'

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.

What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.

Today, hundreds of millions dwell in freedom, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, from the Western Approaches to the Aegean. And while we must never take this for granted, the first purpose of the European Union - to secure peace - has been achieved and we should pay tribute to all those in the EU, alongside Nato, who made that happen.

I always showed myself in the face of day, asserting the liberty and independence of my country, while some others, like owls, courted concealment and were too much afraid of losing their roosts to leave them for such a cause.

We fought a revolution to free ourselves from arbitrary power and the whims of a monarch.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

To some, incredibly, Russia has become a human rights leader. Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower, has succeeded in his asylum application in Russia, and White House spokesman Jay Carney appears flummoxed and wrong-footed as the mantle of free speech and liberty appears to pass from West to East.

The enemies of freedom will not prevail.

The state ought not to intervene to prevent individuals from doing things that not only are no risk to others but are of no risk to themselves either.

I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.

We hold our heads high, despite the price we have paid, because freedom is priceless.

Freedom is priceless.

Americans take justifiable pride in the freedoms given to them by nature or God and enshrined in the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

America will nurture a new Muslim - one who can believe in Muhammad and the Quran but who abandons belief in a Shariah-based state and affirms the primary American value of individual liberty, which has not been a normative Islamic value.