On Liberty Quotes

#1. Freedom can't be kept for nothing. If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else.

Seneca The Younger

#2. The commitment to civil liberty is going to be reasserted strongly. But the concept of liberty is under attack, and our definition of insecurity, security and threats will change fundamentally. The depth of the attack on liberty will be felt painfully.

Ashraf Ghani

#3. 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

#4. Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.

Lord Acton

#5. The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.

James Madison

#6. Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically - i.e. in the form of society aimed at - the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality.

George Orwell

#7. America, my friends, is the only country in the world actually founded on liberty - the only one. People went to America to be free.

Margaret Thatcher

#8. A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

Alan Ryan

#9. The greatest abuse that we perpetrate on liberty is our assumed right to it.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#10. On Liberty, 'that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

Andrew Roberts

#11. If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity.
An ideal society should be mobile and
full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.

B.R. Ambedkar

#12. 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

Albert Einstein

#13. I will take any liberty I want with facts as long as I don't trespass on the truth ... We confuse facts with truth.

Farley Mowat

#14. If you don't have liberty and self-determination, you've got nothing, that's what this is what this country is built on. And this is the ultimate self-determination, when you determine how and when you're going to die when you're suffering.

Jack Kevorkian

#15. A mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that "natural liberty" which they have enjoyed in the first place.

Arthur Herman

#16. Our long-term security depends on our deep faith in liberty. And we'll continue to promote freedom around the world.

George W. Bush

#17. Liberty," he continued, wrinkling his nose at the used condom that lay on the bottom flight of steps, toeing it to the side of the stairs with distaste. "Someone could slip on that. Break their necks," he muttered, interrupting himself. "Like a banana peel, only with bad taste and irony thrown in.

Neil Gaiman

#18. Be sure that Christ is not behind you, but before, calling and drawing you on. This is the liberty, the beautiful liberty of Christ. Claim your glorious privilege in the name of a disciple; be no more a servant, when Christ will own you as a friend.

Horace Bushnell

#19. Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.

Horace Mann

#20. There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.

Philip K. Dick

#21. It continues to defy explanation why liberals who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe.

Mona Charen

#22. The Senate voted 97-0 for an anti-spam bill to stop those annoying things you get on your computer. The senators made it very clear that when you start misleading the American people and start taking their money over false promises, that's our turf, buddy!

Jay Leno

#23. Life on the open road is liberty ... to be alone, to have few needs, to be unknown, everywhere a foreigner and at home, and to walk grandly and solitarily in conquest of the world.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#24. If Nixon is not forced to turn over tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law, then liberty will soon be dead in this nation.

Earl Warren

#25. The liberties of a people depend on their own constant attention to its preservation.

William Henry Harrison

#26. Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteously being right.

David Brin

#27. In a free society, how can you commit a crime against yourself?

Jesse Ventura

#28. On Positive Liberty: The business of the State is to use its organizing powers for the purpose of furnishing the necessary conditions which allow this people freely to unfold its creative faculties.

Adolf Hitler

#29. I love when girls wear print-on-print. It looks so cool.

Liberty Ross

#30. Every single day was just a box on the calendar that I could put a red X through; each one brought me closer to Lucas and to liberty.

Claudia Gray

#31. 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

#32. Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind.

John Dryden

#33. I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance.

Thomas Jefferson

#34. 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

#35. There is no problem anywhere on the earth which cannot be solved better under Liberty than under any other system.

John Longenecker

#36. The first time I saw America was from my perch on the mast of a Spanish naval ship, where I could spot the Statue of Liberty reaching proudly into the open, endless American sky.

Jose Andres

#37. Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

#38. I dare not exercise personal liberty if it infringes on the liberty of others.

Billy Sunday

#39. IT IS A MISTAKE to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a modest (if illusory) security.

Theodore Dalrymple

#40. What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

James Madison

#41. Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

Jack Kemp

#42. 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

#43. Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

Mary McCarthy

#44. Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.

Samuel Adams

#45. There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

Charlie Pierce

#46. Defending birthright citizenship is about being on the right side of liberty. The 14th Amendment is a great legacy of the Republican Party.

Mark McKinnon

#47. President Obama pushed for fairness in the military, listening to commanders as we ended Don't Ask Don't Tell, and on how to allow women to officially serve in more combat jobs. Because America's daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons!

Tammy Duckworth

#48. The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.

Henry Ward Beecher

#49. Shake off the tonnage of old genetics, nitpicking naysayers and hand-me-down Egos hoarding junk in the back of your mind.

Be a Friday night liberty set loose on Monday morning.

Laurie Perez

#50. We remain in Iraq because we know that sometimes liberty needs some nursing before it can grow on its own.

Virginia Foxx

#51. A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.

Milton Friedman

#52. Words Like Freedom
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heartstrings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I know
You would know why.

Langston Hughes

#53. I wish I could tell you which issues will move forward surprisingly fast and which will slip unaccountably backward. There will be surprises in store on both fronts. All I know for sure is that those twenty-six shapes are what we have to defend our liberty and sustain our hope.

Andrew Solomon

#54. Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.

George Washington

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

Thomas Jefferson

#58. Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

Albert Camus

#59. A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

Liberty Hyde Bailey

#60. 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

#61. Give me liberty or give me death.
[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]

Patrick Henry

#62. Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#63. I guess I showed certain signs of being a workaholic in early years; I had a magazine route very early on - I must have been about seven or eight years old or something like that - when I was carrying Liberty magazine, trying to win green and brown coupons; I eventually [won] a pony.

Walter Cronkite

#64. This day would bring only one of two possible outcomes: liberty or death. I faced both with a smile on my face. The

Tillie Cole

#65. Liberty and order will never be perfectly safe until a trespass on the Constitution provisions for either, shall be felt with the same keenness that resents and invasion of the dearest rights ...

James Madison

#66. 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

#67. The man on the top of the hierarchy has created social fear in order for us to accept him as the leader.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#68. But gentlemen, as long as I am an American Citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy

#69. I give you back your liberty, Christine, on condition that this ring is always on your finger. As long as you keep it, you will be protected against all danger and Erik will remain your friend. But woe to you if you ever part with it, for Erik will have his revenge!

Gaston Leroux

#70. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded.

David Hume

#71. 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

#72. We must all rise to the challenge to demonstrate that security and prosperity in the Internet age are not only compatible with liberty, they ultimately depend on it.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#73. Now I find my good men
Are gathered in the night
To wait in silence, not to sleep
And the glorious word of liberty
They whisper and murmur
Till in unaccustomed strangeness
On the steps of our temper
Once again in delight they cry
Freedom! Freedom!

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#74. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.

St. George Tucker

#75. To live your life without oppression, making love the way you wish, loving those you wish to be with - is to live on the right of the spectrum.

Auliq Ice

#76. So if you were dating the UPS guy, he could buy you whatever the hell he wanted. But I cant.well ... yes, but I'd never date the UPS guy. Those brown shorts are just not a turn-on for me.

Lisa Kleypas

#77. This is America. We must defend the principles symbolized by Lady Liberty - unless she's on the pill, in which case, she is a giant green tramp.

Stephen Colbert

#78. 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

#79. Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.

Rudolph Rummel

#80. Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

Thomas Jefferson

#81. we revere our founding fathers precisely because they were loudmouths on the subject of freedom: Give me liberty or give me death!

Susan Cain

#82. The terrorist seeks to smash the most fundamental liberty of all: the right to lead our everyday lives on the basic assumption of safety.

Charles Kennedy

#83. I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.

Viktor E. Frankl

#84. On films, you have the liberty of working out the details, the psychology, taking maybe more risks and takes than you can in television just because you can't be figuring things out on the day.

Rami Malek

#85. We must convince each generation that they are transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future.

Bernard Lown

#86. In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

Henry Hazlitt

#87. We cannot be happy without being free; we cannot be free without being secure in our property; we cannot be secure in our property if, without our consent, others may, as by right, take it away; taxes imposed on us by Parliament do thus take it away.

John Dickinson

#88. I may err in my measures, but never shall deflect from the intention to fortify the public liberty by every possible means, and to put it out of the power of the few to riot on the labors of the many.

Thomas Jefferson

#89. As long as I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject, being amenable to the laws of my country for the same.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy

#90. 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

#91. I can't think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be.

Neal Boortz

#92. I have seen the rise of fascism and communism. Both philosophies glorify the arbitrary power of the state ... But both theories fail. Both deny those God-given liberties that are the inalienable right of each person on this planet, indeed, they deny the existence of God.

Ronald Reagan

#93. We see our liberties curtailed more and more and more.We see a tremendous attack on religious freedom.

Rafael Cruz

#94. 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

#95. This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.

J.D. Salinger

#96. A tyranny based on ... deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself.

Albert Einstein

#97. Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.

Thomas Jefferson

#98. There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others.

Elbert Hubbard

#99. Yes, we [USA] can be safe and secure, if we stay on the offense against the terrorists and if we spread freedom and liberty around the world.

George W. Bush

#100. The priceless heritage of the free and independent interchange of thought is not to be kept without ceaseless vigilance. Only by guarding the truth itself can we guard the greatest of all our liberties-the right to proclaim the truth. On that liberty rests the destiny of millions.

Julius Elias, 1st Viscount Southwood