Top 100 Human Liberty Quotes
#1. We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.
Ronald Reagan
#2. A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious ... When conducted with magnanimity, justice and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.
Alexander Hamilton
#3. Liberty and choice are the essential components that constitute human dignity.
Khaled Abou El Fadl
#5. I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.
Woodrow Wilson
#6. The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race: that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#7. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
Christopher Hitchens
#8. I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost.
J. Reuben Clark
#9. To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.
Aldous Huxley
#10. A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
Walter Lippmann
#11. I am happy that I can aid those admirable men, both living and dead, who by their pens or their tongues have aided the great cause of human liberty and universal happiness.
James Watson
#12. I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas
John F. Kennedy
#13. For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their 'freedom deficit' signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies.
Elliott Abrams
#14. [Government's] great contribution to human wisdom ... is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
H.L. Mencken
#15. The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.
Charles Krauthammer
#16. Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
John Stuart Mill
#17. Terrorists and their allies believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights and every charter of liberty ever written are lies to be burned and destroyed and forgotten.
George W. Bush
#18. Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind.
John Dryden
#19. If we cherish the virtues and the principles of our fathers, Heaven will assist us to carry on the work of human liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our path.
Daniel Webster
#20. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
John Stuart Mill
#21. Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Isaiah Berlin
#22. The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
Ernest Renan
#23. Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world's population and defending it for most of the rest.
Margaret Thatcher
#24. In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
Ayn Rand
#25. When you consider what Tony Blair was saying about liberty, human rights and that sort of thing, it would be terribly revolutionary to sell the speeches he and Jack Straw made in 1994.
Rory Bremner
#26. If God existed, only in one way could he serve the cause of human liberty-by ceasing to exist.
Mikhail Bakunin
#27. The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.
Woodrow Wilson
#28. And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.
John Stuart Mill
#29. The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.
Thomas Jefferson
#30. If the speed of an aero equals zero, the aero is motionless; if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#31. [Jehovah is] certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.
Mikhail Bakunin
#32. The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power ...
Thomas Paine
#33. A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.
Matthew Woodring Stover
#34. The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
Eric Hoffer
#35. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.
Mark Twain
#36. Human will does not by liberty obtain grace, but by grace obtains liberty.
John Calvin
#37. Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.
Isaiah Berlin
#38. If each human being is to have liberty, he cannot also have the liberty to deprive others of their liberty.
John Hospers
#39. But while human liberty has engaged the attention of the enlightened, and enlisted the feelings of the generous of all civilized nations, may we not enquire if this liberty has been rightly understood?
Frances Wright
#40. France has been struck on the day of her national holiday - the 14th of July, Bastille Day - the symbol of liberty, because human rights are denied by fanatics, and France is clearly their target.
Francois Hollande
#41. We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
Archibald MacLeish
#42. Nothing is more likely than that [the] enumeration of powers is defective. This is the ordinary case of all human works. Let us then go on perfecting it by adding by way of amendment to the Constitution those powers which time and trial show are still wanting
Thomas Jefferson
#43. Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.
William Lloyd Garrison
#44. Government has hardened into a tyrannical monopoly, and the human race in general becomes as absolutely property as beasts in the plow.
John Dickinson
#45. Thomas Jefferson High
School [..] His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of
the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. I don't believe in any form of unjustified extremism! But when a man is exercising extremism
a human being is exercising extremism
in defense of liberty for human beings it's no vice, and when one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings I say he is a sinner.
Malcolm X
#47. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and of the concepts of liberty, freedom, and self-determination. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. He (Obama) believes that the pie is fixed and that he needs to more equitably divide up the slices.
Paul Ryan
#48. Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard.
Ludwig Von Mises
#49. As man develops, he places a greater value upon his own rights. Liberty becomes a grander and diviner thing. As he values his own rights, he begins to value the rights of others. And when all men give to all others all the rights they claim for themselves, this world will be civilized.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#50. I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
Henry David Thoreau
#51. The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
Friedrich Hayek
#52. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies ... Liberty will come to those who love it.
George W. Bush
#53. The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament ...
Soren Kierkegaard
#55. It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.
Horace Greeley
#56. As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?
Rowan Atkinson
#57. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist.
Mikhail Bakunin
#58. It is certain that the most natural and human government is that of consent, for that binds freely, ... when men hold their liberty by true obedience to rules of their own making.
William Penn
#59. Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry to survive, Your Honor. Besides the advancement of truth, science and morality in general, the freedom of the press is a backbone of democracy. It exists to keep the government transparent, and the human instruments of government honest.
Kenneth Eade
#60. The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#61. The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy ... Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.
Thomas Jefferson
#62. It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#63. What can be happier than for a man, conscious of virtuous acts, and content with liberty, to despise all human affairs?
[Lat., Quid enim est melius quam memoria recte factorum, et libertate contentum negligere humana?]
Marcus Junius Brutus The Younger
#64. There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.
Alexander Hamilton
#65. America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others.
Alex Epstein
#66. Now I will avow, that I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system.
Thomas Jefferson
#67. My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty.
Mahatma Gandhi
#68. Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths
Will Durant
#69. You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
William Blake
#70. Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.
A.E. Samaan
#71. My sentiments for the American cause, from the Stamp Act downward, have never changed ... I am still of opinion that it is the cause of liberty and of human nature.
Christopher Gadsden
#72. The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.
Osama Bin Laden
#73. Liberty is the only idea which circulates with the human blood, in all ages, in all countries, and in all literature - liberty that is, and what cannot be separated from liberty, a love of country.
Madame De Stael
#74. Those (who) seek to establish systems of Government based on the regimentation of all Human Beings by a handful of individual rulers ... call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#75. A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.
Mark Twain
#76. True human progress is based less on the inventive mind than on the conscience of such men as Brandeis.
~ Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
#77. What we need is a new consciousness concerning the idea of human liberty.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#78. It is not in virtue of its liberty that the human will attains to grace, it is much rather by grace that it attains to liberty.
Saint Augustine
#79. In the West we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live as we choose. Liberty is codified in human rights, a magnificent Western creation but also, I believe, a universal good.
Ibn Warraq
#80. The institution of taxation is not a civilized but a barbaric method to fund anything ... it amounts to ... a gross violation of human liberty.
Tibor R. Machan
#81. [If you understood the natural rights of mankind,] [y]ou would be convinced that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice.
Alexander Hamilton
#82. Life in this form is one-time chance, death is the inevitable consequence for anyone who is born. The record of one's death is the primary respect one could render to the lost one. Tears of all relatives of missing people are indeed flowing due to this invaluable action by the authority.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#83. An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.
Jon Meacham
#84. Without equality, I say, there cannot be liberty.
Harold Laski
#85. I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride - humility in the weight of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this home of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised.
Douglas MacArthur
#86. Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his Breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-Besotted Traveler; he
Served human liberty.
Jonathan Swift
#87. Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.
Jose Marti
#88. In the United States, constitutional guarantees of religious liberty protect the church from actions that might otherwise be considered abusive or in violation of laws in human trafficking or labor standards.
Lawrence Wright
#89. Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
Samuel Johnson
#90. Evil comes in many forms and seems to reinvent itself time and again. But whatever it calls itself - Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, today, terrorism - they all have one thing in common: the destruction, the end of human liberty.
Stephen Harper
#91. The contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty and those who kill. [on the terrorist bombings in London, July 7, 2005
George W. Bush
#92. I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#93. From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.
Robert Trout
#94. Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.
Isaiah Berlin
#95. when the humanist revolution preached the stirring ideals of human liberty, human equality and human fraternity. Since 1789, despite numerous wars, revolutions and upheavals, humans have not managed to come up with any new value. All
Yuval Noah Harari
#96. Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.
Nathaniel Branden
#97. A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. Protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.
Samuel Alito
#98. Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds - but with that word realized - with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#99. Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.
Hyman Rickover
#100. The Founders believed, and the Conservative agrees, in the dignity of the individual; that we, as human beings, have a right to live, live freely, and pursue that which motivates us not because man or some government says so, but because these are God-given natural rights.
Mark R. Levin
