Top 100 Liberty Of Man Quotes
#1. The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.
Samuel Adams
#2. The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.
Mikhail Bakunin
#3. Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer ... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.
Lucretius
#5. I have dashed across continents and oceans as a fugitive and have matched my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive me of one of the greatest blessings man can have-liberty.
Jack Johnson
#6. Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.
Austin O'Malley
#7. If the choice is given to us of liberty or security, we must scorn the latter with the proper contempt of free man and the sound judgment of wise men who know that liberty and security are not incompatible in the lives of honest men.
James Farley
#8. The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#9. Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.
Karl Marx
#10. When liberty becomes license, some form of one-man power is not far distant.
Theodore Roosevelt
#11. The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.
H.L. Mencken
#12. Every intelligent man saw the poverty that would follow the destruction of the beaver, but there were no chiefs to control it; all was perfect liberty and equality.
David Thompson
#13. It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment
Francis Bacon
#14. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
Thomas Paine
#15. Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it.
Oliver Cromwell
#16. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.
George Sutherland
#17. From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty
Victor Hugo
#18. I have often expressed my sentiments, that every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.
George Washington
#19. O liberty, Parent of happiness, celestial born When the first man became a living soul; His sacred genius thou.
Edward Dyer
#20. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
Arthur Koestler
#21. We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes - whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought.
Frederick William Robertson
#23. It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
Thomas Jefferson
#24. A man won't steal, ordinarily, unless that which he steals is something he cannot as easily get without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would not be apt to steal.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#25. Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man, even though he is better able to bear them. In plainer words, that you should not make one set of men pay for what is used by another set of men.
Auberon Herbert
#26. I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.
Man Ray
#27. We must not then depend alone upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for its preservation.
John Adams
#28. No man [ ... ] can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.
John Milton
#29. It is proved out of the holy scriptures that an unregenerate man is altogether destitute of the power and liberty of his will, in those things that pertain to faith and salvation.
Peter Du Moulin
#30. The best environment for man is the environment of liberty
Vaclav Klaus
#31. Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.
William Graham Sumner
#32. In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man.
Henry Highland Garnet
#33. EXCEPTION, n. A thing which takes the liberty to differ from other things of its class, as an honest man, a truthful woman, etc.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. Mr. President, not only are you disastrous for the land, you are the man who must be held responsible for all the sins of the cowards, the cowards who were fooled into electing you as president.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#35. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.
George Washington
#36. Liberty coincides with heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, the bow bent to the breaking-point.
Albert Camus
#38. Let the pulpit resound with the doctrine and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear of the dignity of man's nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God ... Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes and parliaments.
John Adams
#39. The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
Walt Whitman
#40. No man ever feels the restraint of law so long as he remains within the sphere of his liberty
a sphere, by the way, always large enough for the full exercise of his powers and the supply of all his legitimate wants.
J.G. Holland
#41. Democrats do have a historic race going. Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama. Normally, when you see a black man or a woman president an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.
Jon Stewart
#42. [F]or as Socrates says that a wise man is a citizen of the world, so I thought that a wise woman was equally at liberty to range through every station or degree of men, to fix her choice wherever she pleased.
Sarah Fielding
#43. Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression ... Our endeavors must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child.
Nelson Mandela
#44. The man on the top of the hierarchy has created social fear in order for us to accept him as the leader.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#45. 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
#46. Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.
Altiero Spinelli
#47. An irresistible passion that would induce me to believe in innate ideas and the truth of prophecy has decided my career. I have always loved liberty with the enthusiasm which actuates the religious man with the passion of a lover and with the conviction of a geometrician.
Marquis De Lafayette
#48. There was one of two things I had a right to: liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would take the other, for no man should take me alive. I should fight for liberty as long as my strength lasted.
Harriet Tubman
#49. I had some short struggle in my mind whether I should resign my lover or my liberty, but this lasted not long. I found myself as free as air and could not bear the thought of putting myself in any man's power for life only from a present capricious inclination.
Sarah Fielding
#50. Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.
Henry Martyn Robert
#51. Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#52. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
Mikhail Bakunin
#53. To usurp dominion over a people, in their own despite, or to grasp at a more extensive power than they are willing to entrust, is to violate that law of nature, which gives every man a right to his personal liberty; and can, therefore, confer no obligation to obedience.
Jonathan Emord
#54. Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
Charles Baudelaire
#55. If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
Herbert Spencer
#56. Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.
Ron Paul
#57. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.
Thomas Jefferson
#58. The Christian religion alone contemplates the conjugal union in the order of nature; it is the only religion which presents woman to man as a companion; every other abandons her to him as a slave. To religion alone do European women owe their liberty.
Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre
#59. Liberty in thought and action is the only condition of life, growth and well-being: Where it does not exist, the man, the race, and the nation must go down.
Swami Vivekananda
#60. 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
#61. Even the soberest judged it requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to ensure the other, as a man, dangerously wounded in any of his limbs, readily parts with it to save the rest of his body.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#62. In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.
William Blackstone
#63. Liberty'.that condition of man in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#64. 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
#65. Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#66. One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle.
James Otis
#67. But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
George Bernard Shaw
#69. All men were made brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born free should be content when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.
Chief Joseph
#70. No man owns me. All man can do is practice the timeless, criminal art of threatening to separate my soul from her physical host.
Tiffany Madison
#71. African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States, and excite in his bosom a lively, deep, decided and heart-felt interest.
Maria W. Stewart
#72. The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also.
Elbert Hubbard
#73. There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today.
Daniel Webster
#74. 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
#75. To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.
Mahatma Gandhi
#76. Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
Herbert Spencer
#77. Man's beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.
Arthur C. Clarke
#78. The Declaration of Independence states the the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.
Vaclav Havel
#79. The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
Walter Lippmann
#80. People, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side
Elizabeth Strout
#81. My aversion to them ... springs from the perniciousness of that sect to society-I hate Papists, as a man, not as a Protestant. If Papists were only enemies to the religion of other men, I should overlook their errors. As they are foes to liberty, I cannot forgive them.
Horace Walpole
#82. God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that anybody may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: 'This is my country!
Benjamin Franklin
#83. 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
#84. There is no man who is enterprising and keeps well up with the times but confesses that the women of to-day are in every respect, except political liberty, equal to the men.
S. Alice Callahan
#85. I will gladly deal with the inconveniences that may attend living my life as I see fit, rather than be the kind of man who would forsake his own desires in order to seek or preserve the acceptance of lesser men.
~ Dave Champion
Dave Champion
#86. There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
Victor Hugo
#87. The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#88. The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
Ayn Rand
#89. The fundamental axiom, then, for the study of man is the existence of individual consciousness
Murray Rothbard
#90. It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#91. Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#92. Hence, in a state of nature, no man had any moral power to deprive another of his life, limbs, property, or liberty; nor the least authority to command or exact obedience from him, except that which arose from the ties of consanguinity.
Alexander Hamilton
#93. The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man ... [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.
(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)
Thomas Jefferson
#94. Our doctrine of equality and liberty and humanity comes from our belief in the brotherhood of man, through the fatherhood of God.
Calvin Coolidge
#95. Alas, why will a man spend months trying to hand over his liberty to a woman
and the rest of his life trying to get it back again?
Helen Rowland
#96. The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.
John Milton
#97. ANARCHISM: - The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
Emma Goldman
#98. No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling and action of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending and maintaining that liberty
Frederick Douglass
#99. For having been educated in a convent, she knew nothing of the customs or manners of the world; and found it difficult to understand that among a people piquing themselves on their liberty, it was the custom to shut a man up in perpetual confinement, to enable him to pay his debts.
Charlotte Turner Smith
#100. Shalt thou give law to God, shalt thou dispute
With Him the points of liberty who made
Thee what thou art and formed the pow'rs of Heav'n
Such as He pleased and circumscribed their being?
John Milton
