Top 100 Quotes About Individual Liberty
#1. I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.
A.E. Samaan
#2. The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
H.L. Mencken
#3. The message of individual liberty and peace is contagious.
Vince Vaughn
#4. Discipline must come through liberty ... We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
Maria Montessori
#5. Freedom and Liberty cannot exist without Individual Responsibilty. Failure to exercise Individual Responsibilty forfeits your right to self-governance and delivers it to Government which, through force, will set the parameters of your life.
Brian Wilson
#6. Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government.
Rory Stewart
#7. Individual liberty and interdependence are both essential for life in society.
Mahatma Gandhi
#8. Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Henry Adams
#9. Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal.
A.E. Samaan
#10. You don't protect any of your individual liberties by lying down and going to sleep.
John T. Scopes
#11. I'm not against the government. I'm against this ever-expanding government that doesn't know its limits. And that's how I see the role of the attorney general, as someone in an office that can protect you and defend the Constitution and defend state sovereignty and our individual liberty.
Alan Wilson
#12. it will have to overcome a social vision that is by now deeply rooted and powerfully dominant among liberals: the idea that the only genuine liberty is individual liberty, and that the only legitimate authority is the authority of the national government. The
Yuval Levin
#13. To a man the greatest blessing is individual liberty; to a dog it is the last word in despair.
William Lyon Phelps
#14. Not just charity, even corruption begins at home.
K. Hari Kumar
#15. Municipal laws are a supply to the wisdom of each individual; and, at the same time, by restraining the natural liberty of men, make private interest submit to the interest of the public.
David Hume
#16. The right of such control is already admitted by the State Socialists, though they maintain that, as a matter of fact, the individual would be allowed a much larger liberty than he now enjoys.
Benjamin Tucker
#18. It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.
Auberon Herbert
#19. Government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of the government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state.
John C. Calhoun
#20. Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.
Jack Kemp
#21. 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
#22. All I'm for is the liberty of the individual.
John Wayne
#23. The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
Ernest Renan
#24. We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.
Rand Paul
#25. 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
#26. Freedom, liberty, individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them, is critical to me.
Jimmy Wales
#27. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#28. Coercive redistribution of wealth through government's abuse of law and misapplication of rights destroys individual liberty; ambition, productivity, and wealth; and the purpose of the commonwealth.
Mark R. Levin
#29. 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
#30. Society demands conformity at the expense of individual liberty. Let us be for once a non conformist to be fully alive.
Wayne W. Dyer
#31. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.
Penn Jillette
#32. The rights of the individual should be the primary object of all governments.
Mercy Otis Warren
#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 proper balance between individual liberty and central authority is a very ancient problem.
Arthur Keith
#35. 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
#36. There are those that want freedom from individual responsibility, and then there are those that want individual liberty. "Freedom" and "liberty" no longer mean what they used to. A desire for dependence has been made fashionably desirable.
A.E. Samaan
#37. In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.
Henry Hazlitt
#38. Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.
James Agee
#39. We Libertarians believe in "Limited Government" precisely because we believe in unlimited liberty. Reduce one, and you decrease the other.
A.E. Samaan
#40. 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
#41. Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice?
Frederic Bastiat
#42. Misrepresentation, false propaganda, innuendoes soon sprout into poisonous weeds, and before long the people find themselves victims of a pollution that has robbed them of their individual liberty and enslaved them to a group of political gangsters.
David O. McKay
#43. Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson
#44. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
David Harvey
#45. There's a line in the picture where he (Johnny - The Wild One) snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life.
Marlon Brando
#46. What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.
Bruce Barton
#47. Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.
John Stuart Mill
#48. People don't seem to understand that the separation of powers is not about the power of these branches; it's there to protect individual liberty - it's there to protect us from the concentration of power.
Jonathan Turley
#49. 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.
John Adams
#51. Why is freedom such a hard sell? That's the question. In this country, why has the idea of individual liberty and responsibility become such a hard sell? That's something I never thought would happen here.
Rush Limbaugh
#52. 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
#53. Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.
Mitch Kapor
#54. Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite.
Sri Aurobindo
#55. Liberty is the result of free individual action,energy and independence.
Samuel Smiles
#56. 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
#57. We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens.
Jay Parini
#58. An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be.
John Galsworthy
#59. The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#60. We should never forget that Americans continue to advocate for individual liberty, equality and self-governance. We often step in when it's necessary to help countries in need. But our history needs no whitewashing. To attempt this does us a terrible disservice.
Jay Parini
#61. Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.
Friedrich Schiller
#62. I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.
Roger Nash Baldwin
#63. I'm a committed Republican. I believe very strongly in individual liberty. I tend not to think much in terms of group politics. I really am a kind of small government person and I'm most certainly a fiscal conservative and strong on national defense.
Condoleezza Rice
#64. Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.
A.E. Samaan
#65. Liberty is a political firewall that limits the damage government can do to the individual.
James Bovard
#66. While democracy must have its organization and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.
Charles Evans Hughes
#67. A citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
#68. The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.
Denis Diderot
#69. If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.
Learned Hand
#70. 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
#71. The fundamental axiom, then, for the study of man is the existence of individual consciousness
Murray Rothbard
#72. If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#73. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.
Thomas Jefferson
#74. The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.
Emma Goldman
#75. The Liberty of the press consists in the right to publish with impunity truth with good motives for justifiable ends, though reflecting on government, magistracy, or individuals.
Alexander Hamilton
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.
Ludwig Von Mises
#79. Claiming for ourselves liberty of conscience, liberty to worship, we shall see to it that every other individual enjoys the same right.
James Larkin
#80. What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty; and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.
Louis D. Brandeis
#81. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.
Emma Goldman
#82. Liberty (individual freedom) is the prize, responsibility the price.
Dick Randolph
#83. Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end in itself. This presumption was then reinforced by an unassailable belief in the common sense of the individual.
Stanley Hauerwas
#84. There is no true liberty for the individual except as he finds it in the liberty of all. There is no true security for the individual except as he finds it in the security for all.
Edwin Markham
#85. I follow a set of principles, I follow the Constitution. And that's what I base my votes on. Limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty.
Justin Amash
#86. [T]hough individual oppression may now and then proceed fro the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter ...
Alexander Hamilton
#87. We believe, as our founders did, that 'the pursuit of happiness' depends upon individual liberty; and individual liberty requires limited government.
Paul Ryan
#88. Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger.
Mike Godwin
#89. Individual liberty may be unable to solve every social problem, but collective violence is unable to solve any social problem.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#90. I'm a conservative Republican, small-business guy, married to same gal - love of my life - for 36 years. Strong family man, deacon at my church; I believe in America. I know government is not the answer; individual liberty and personal responsibility is the answer.
Randy Weber
#91. I do not think that under modern Western materialism we should have anarchy. I doubt whether we should have enough individual valour and spirit even to have liberty.
G.K. Chesterton
#92. 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
#93. We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#94. I am not a political man and I have no political convictions. I am an individual and a believer in liberty. That is all the politics I have.
Charlie Chaplin
#95. The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
#96. The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop.
Alexander Herzen
#97. Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law.
Henry Campbell Black
#98. Perhaps, there is no such person who can be called truly free, but only those who can be deemed so by comparison.
Ashim Shanker
#99. In a government bottomed on the will of all, the ... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.
Thomas Jefferson
#100. 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
