Quotes About Liberty

Men who are scandalized at the lack of freedom in Russia do not ask themselves how real is liberty among the poor, the weak, and the ignorant in capitalist society.

Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave.

[Liberty] is freedom of choice, a divine gift, an essential virtue in a peaceful society.

Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.

When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom.

The freedom enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional government explains both the quality of its civilization and its wealth.

True freedom is always spiritual. It has something to do with your innermost being, which cannot be chained, handcuffed, or put into a jail.

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty

Less glory is more liberty. When the drum is silent, reason sometimes speaks.

If his country should be robbed of her liberties, he should still not despair. The protest of the Right against the Fact persists forever.

Liberties aren't given, they are taken.

I don't want comfort. I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.

But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.

Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.

I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to be or not.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

I'll MAKE you be free whether you want to or not.' -The Savage

Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the sacle and of total control at the other.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.

what would it be like if I could, if I were free

Only the most ingeniously optimistic, the most wilfully blind to the facts of history and psychology, can believe that paper guarantees of liberty - guarantees wholly unsupported by the realities of political and economic power - will be scrupulously respected by those who have known only the facts of governmental omnipotence on the one hand and, on the other, of mass dependence upon, and consequently subservience to, the state and its representatives.