Quotes About Liberty

He was a worshiper of liberty, a friend of the oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote these words: "For Justice all place a temple, and all season, summer." He believed that happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.

We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.

Mercy there was great, and grace was free; Pardon there was multiplied to me; There my burdened soul found liberty at Calvary.

But I should think our patriotism was warped and stunted indeed if it did not embrace the Greater Britain beyond the seas—the young and vigorous nations carrying everywhere a knowledge of the English tongue and English love of liberty and law. With these feelings, I refuse to speak or think of the United States as a foreign nation. They are our flesh and blood.… Our past is theirs. Their future is ours.…

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.

My body which my dungeon is,And yet my parks and palaces.

Now, we know that life is only a stage to play the fool upon as long as the part amuses us. There was one more convenience lacking to modern comfort; a decent easy way to quit that stage; the back stairs to liberty; or, as I said this moment, Death's private door. This… is supplied by the Suicide Club.

That is what freedom is—the power to choose.

September was a corresponding time of relaxation. Its calends were consecrated, rightly and properly, to Juno, but in this instance to the Regina whom Camillus and his juvenes had brought from Veii. Like other foreign deities, this Etruscan Uni was installed on the Aventine (near to the present-day Sta Sabina), as well as a Jupiter of Osco-Umbrian origin whose anniversary was celebrated on the same day, 1 September: a Jupiter Liber or Libertas, god of liberty and not of wine

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

A person without self-expression is a person without personal freedom.

La única manera de lidiar con este mundo sin libertad es volverte tan absolutamente libre que tu mera existencia sea un acto de rebelión».

to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others

Most people have liberty. They can go where they want and do the things they feel like doing. But too many people are also slaves to their impulses. They have grown reactive rather than proactive, meaning that they are like seafoam pounding against a rocky shore, going in whatever direction the tide might take them.

Remember that on the other side of fear lies freedom

My explanation is that England led the way in science for the same reasons that it led the way in the Industrial Revolution31 – its substantially greater political and economic liberty had produced a relatively open class system that enabled the emergence of an ambitious and creative upper middle class, sometimes called the bourgeoisie. While the rise of the bourgeoisie occurred all across western Europe, it did so earlier and to a far greater degree in England.

The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?

The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons.

Classical liberalism tells of the growth of individual liberty against the power of the sovereign. Socialism tells of the steadily increasing equality brought about by the state at the expense of the entrenched hierarchies of social power.

Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?

Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty as issuing from political order. What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.

Liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn't any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do. Rather it's conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority.

So conceived, the English police force served to emphasize a fundamental truth about the English law, which is that it exists not to control the individual but to free him. The

Whatever we think about the revolutions, the original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.