Top 77 Liberty Tyranny Quotes
#1. Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.
Noah Webster
#2. Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
John Kennedy Toole
#3. The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
Thomas Sowell
#4. No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
Rose Wilder Lane
#5. 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
#6. The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
Gene Sharp
#7. Conservative n.
A person who possesses an underdeveloped taste for tyranny.
liberal n.
A person who believes in liberty, but only for the state.
Leslie Starr O'Hara
#8. Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#9. The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
#10. Free society's organize around the "invisible hand" while Force society's organize around the State's "visible fist.
Orrin Woodward
#11. It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.
Ron Paul
#12. We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas Jefferson
#13. In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the publick. The publick, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries kings and aristocrats are to be watched.
James F. Cooper
#14. Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.
Aeschylus
#15. The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.
Emily Greene Balch
#16. Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
John Stuart Mill
#17. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.
Thomas Jefferson
#18. It is the right of a free individual to be unhindered in their liberty!
Especially to fail in their endeavors!
Only in this manner are they truly free.
Keith Parfitt
#19. Our liberty will not be secured at the sword's point ... We must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And when the people reaches that height, God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards, and liberty will shine out like the first dawn.
Jose Rizal
#21. I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny. For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord, the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign.
Cato The Younger
#22. Tyranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law.
Joseph Sobran
#23. We must teach our children that the preservation of liberty, and of an order of society conducive to human dignity, requires that a free people retain the moral and material means to discipline its own government, should the temptation to tyranny take root.
Alan Keyes
#24. At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. For which service the senate, with complimentary resolutions, enrolled me in its order ...
Augustus
#25. When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson
#26. Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.
Frances Wright
#28. All the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality. Away, away with tyranny and oppression!
Maria W. Stewart
#29. Montesquieu well knew, and justly admired, the happy constitution of this country [Great Britain], where fixed and known laws equally restrain monarchy from tyranny and liberty from licentiousness.
Lord Chesterfield
#30. Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one.
Thomas Jefferson
#32. If the world knew how to use freedom without abusing it, tyranny would not exist.
Tehyi Hsieh
#33. The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.
Michael Parenti
#34. The Second Amendment is timeless for our Founders grasped that self-defense is three-fold: every free individual must protect themselves against the evil will of the man, the mob and the state.
Tiffany Madison
#35. Liberty may make mistakes but tyranny is the death of a nation.
Giacomo Matteotti
#36. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
James Madison
#37. Liberty and freedom were the primary reason that people wanted to come here. They wanted to escape bondage, slavery, tyranny, poverty, whatever, where they lived. It was America that promised a much better life.
Rush Limbaugh
#38. Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty.
Jose Marti
#39. The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.
William J. Clinton
#40. Today in the early Twenty-First Century, we Americans are once again faced with the same basic choice: liberty or tyranny, freedom or servitude. However, the attitude of far too many Americans towards our problems is one of both ignorance and apathy: "I don't know and I don't care.
Chris Hambleton
#41. A tyranny based on ... deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself.
Albert Einstein
#42. A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
Ayn Rand
#43. The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.
Donald James
#44. A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude.
Calvin Coolidge
#45. Freemasonry teaches not merely temperance, fortitude, prudence, justice, brotherly love, relief, and truth, but liberty, equality, and fraternity, and it denounces ignorance, superstition, bigotry, lust tyranny and despotism.
Theodore Roosevelt
#46. Our nation is founded on the principal that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny.
John F. Kennedy
#47. Only liberty can truly ward off tyranny, the great and eternal foe of mankind.
Ron Paul
#49. Tyranny flourishes in those societies that reject the Reformed Faith. Tyranny is squelched and liberty flourishes in those societies that embrace the Reformed Faith in all its fullness.
Joseph C. Morecraft III
#50. There must be absolute religious liberty, for tyranny and intolerance are as abhorrent in matters intellectual and spiritual as in matters political and material; and more and more we must all realize that conduct is of infinitely greater importance than dogma.
Theodore Roosevelt
#51. Cin. Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead! Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.
William Shakespeare
#52. The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.
Georg Buchner
#53. The idea [passing the 17th amendment] benefited from a unique political and cultural atmosphere that consumed a nation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries-a progressive populism promoting simultaneously radical egalitarianism and centralized authoritarianism.
Mark Levin
#54. Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal.
A.E. Samaan
#55. 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
#56. In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point
out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is
not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate
them.
Pierre Trudeau
#57. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.
George W. Bush
#58. Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.
Theodore Roosevelt
#59. When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
#60. Those which defend liberty, equality and fraternity, seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred.
Claude Gueant
#61. The act of voting by ordinary Iraqis in the face of extreme danger confirms President Bush's belief that people around the globe, when given a chance, will choose liberty and democracy over enslavement and tyranny.
John Ensign
#62. The essential psychological requirement of a free society is the willingness on the part of the individual to accept responsibility for his life. - Edith Packer
When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny.
Thomas Paine
#63. The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.
Walter E. Williams
#64. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#65. Liberty, when it degrades into licentiousness, begets confusion, and frequently ends in tyranny or some woeful confusion.
George Washington
#66. The liberty that the Band of Brothers fought for was not a freedom to do whatever we want whenever we want, but rather a freedom from tyranny, a freedom of self-determination, a freedom to make something of our lives.
Marcus Brotherton
#67. The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#68. The loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression. Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny.
Nancy Pearcey
#69. England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#70. If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.
Jonah Goldberg
#71. I preferred measuring deer tracks to tape - that I liked the wild liberty of the Red men better then the tyranny of my brothers.
Sam Houston
#72. If there were an exact and universal scale of punishments and crimes, we would have a fairly reliable and shared instrument to measure the degree of tyranny and liberty, of the basic humanity or malice of the different nations.
Cesare Beccaria
#73. Most gun control arguments miss the point. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? How can a truly "free" state exist if the individual citizen is enslaved to the forceful will of individual or organized aggressors? It cannot.
Tiffany Madison
#74. No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.
Calvin Coolidge
#75. How terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!
E.A. Bucchianeri
#76. The framers were realists; they recognized that the best constitution in the world could be distorted and destroyed by men determined to do so.
John Eidsmoe
#77. When the people are afraid of the government, that's tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that's liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
