Quotes About Liberties

#1. The people's liberties strengthen the king's prerogative, and the king's prerogative is to defend the people's liberties.

Charles I Of England

#2. Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?

Christina Rossetti

#3. The siren song of redistribution of wealth by centralized government never ceases for those who seek irreversible and unusurpable control over the lives and liberties of private citizens.

Josh Jones

#4. After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.

William J. Brennan

#5. The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.

George Steiner

#6. Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling ... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.

C.S. Lewis

#7. It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.

Earl Warren

#8. But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.

Sarah Fielding

#9. No foteball player be used or suffered within the City of London and the liberties thereof upon pain of imprisonment.

Elizabeth I

#10. I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.

Benjamin Franklin

#11. Republicans are horrible with civil liberties, and not so good with dollars and cents. Democrats are horrible with dollars and cents, and not so good with civil liberties.

Gary Johnson

#12. The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but is instead a threat to our liberties.

Ron Paul

#13. 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

#14. The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.

William O. Douglas

#15. Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases.

Robert H. Jackson

#16. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

Michelle M. Pillow

#17. If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.

Marquis De Lafayette

#18. You don't protect any of your individual liberties by lying down and going to sleep.

John T. Scopes

#19. As an immigrant, I appreciate, far more than the average American, the liberties we have in this country. Silence is a big enemy of morality. I don't want our blunders in history to get repeated.

Gloria Estefan

#20. War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.

Joseph Sobran

#21. Having the right to choose determines whether women will find an equal place at life's table, whether children will be truly valued, and whether everyone's personal liberties, privacy, and bodily integrity will be safeguarded against the ideology of the right.

Gloria Feldt

#22. What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.

Howard Jacobson

#23. I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

Sara Sheridan

#24. What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty ... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.

Elbridge Gerry

#25. What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

Thomas Jefferson

#26. We may sometimes take greater liberties in November than in May.

Jane Austen

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

William Henry Harrison

#28. Conscious of my own weakness, I can only seek fervently the guidance of the Ruler of the Universe, and, relying on His all-powerful aid, do my best to restore Union and peace to a suffering people, and to establish and guard their liberties and rights.

George B. McClellan

#29. If we expose the Chinese to our freedoms, it may create a greater hunger for democracy, reform and liberties in China.

Gary Locke

#30. IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE COULD LEARN WHAT I KNOW OF THE FIERCE HATRED OF THE PRIESTS OF ROME AGAINST OUR INSTITUTIONS, OUR SCHOOLS, OUR MOST SACRED RIGHTS, AND OUR SO DEARLY BOUGHT LIBERTIES, THEY WOULD DRIVE THEM OUT AS TRAITORS!

Abraham Lincoln

#31. I believe that all forms of socialism have been proven over time to result in a loss of both economic and civil liberties, with increasing poverty.

John Mackey

#32. I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#33. If the union of these States, and the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little to any one man of fifty-two yearsof age, but a great deal to the thirty millions of people who inhabit these United States, and to their posterity in all coming time.

Abraham Lincoln

#34. Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Norman O. Brown

#35. I don't think I should tell you what to do, nor should the government. As long as you enjoy your own personal liberties and don't infringe on the liberties of others, I don't care.

Armie Hammer

#36. Be not intimidated ... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

John Adams

#37. I like to say 'Reign' is the '24' of the pre-Renaissance. I think we're going to take a lot of liberties with history, as well as extend it over a longer period of time.

Megan Follows

#38. Let it not be said that no one cared, that no one objected once it's realized that our liberties and wealth are in jeopardy.

Ron Paul

#39. Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers ...

William O. Douglas

#40. Basic decisions of our society are made through the expressed will of the people. That is why when we see these liberties threatened, instead of falling apart, our nation becomes unified and our democracies come together... in spite of our varied backgrounds and many racial strains.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#41. The new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.

Charley Reese

#42. Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken.

Greg Kinnear

#43. When life has gone into overtime it's easy to take liberties,

Jonas Jonasson

#44. Heroes did not make our liberties; they but reflected and illustrated them.

James A. Garfield

#45. I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test.

Patricia Hewitt

#46. As we have seen from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's example, even one justice can profoundly alter the meaning of those words for our citizens. Even one justice can deeply affect the rights and liberties of the American people.

Edward Kennedy

#47. The Roman Catholics must know as well as we do that 'Popery' when encouraged by government has always been dangerous to the liberties of the people.

Lord George Gordon

#48. It is idle to talk of civil liberties to adults who were systematically taught in adolescence that they had none; and it is sheer hypocrisy to call such people freedom loving.

Edgar Friedenberg

#49. I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.

Andrew Jackson

#50. I think whoever is the president [he] must guard your liberties, must not erode your rights in America.

George W. Bush

#51. I think liberals have to come to terms with the market and embrace market mechanisms as the only way to run a society that produces widespread material well-being and respects individual rights and liberties.

Douglas Massey

#52. Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

Sara Paretsky

#53. We must erase bin Laden's ugly legacy, not extend it: by ending the Patriot Act's erosion of our civil liberties, we can protect the freedoms that make America worth fighting for.

Aaron Swartz

#54. You have an always-expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that's constantly chipping away at the liberties and freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

Ron Wyden

#55. One of the most clearly marked trends for over twenty years has been the decline in civil liberties.

Charles A. Reich

#56. Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs,
our policy against narcotics
like any public policy
comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings
are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.

Joel Miller

#57. Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties, and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terror.

George Pataki

#58. God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever." (Thomas Jefferson)

John Price

#59. 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

#60. How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

Soren Kierkegaard

#61. Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.

Abraham Lincoln

#62. By 1950, he had come to view the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species capable of foretelling things to come - if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, it would be an early indicator that broader freedoms of thought and action were also at risk.

Jonathan Eller

#63. Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.

Neil Nakadate

#64. If the expansion of a global legal regime for communication technologies gains traction, the effects to the global economy as well as our individual liberties will be severe.

Marsha Blackburn

#65. I, my own damn self, am not a Tea Party supporter. I disagree with them on social liberties, our overseas wars, Obama's birthplace, Sarah Palin, and the conspicuous absence of tea at their rallies.

Penn Jillette

#66. One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors.

Arnold Goodman, Baron Goodman

#67. Since the writing of our Constitution, our religious liberties have been systematically threatened and whittled away by Supreme Court justices who interpret the First Amendment as a prohibition against religious activity on public property.

Tim LaHaye

#68. As the Sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established

David McCullough

#69. From the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism, and national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state ...

Friedrich Hayek

#70. And if novelties are to be shunned, believe me, the most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rending us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties, and promote our happiness.

James Madison

#71. No, sometimes we just have to take liberties because the idea was so good. I wish we'd just gone with the idea that Patsy had been a man. It would have been fantastic.

Jennifer Saunders

#72. The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

James McGreevey

#73. So the question is, First, Whether the civil magistrate hath power to force men in things religious to do contrary to their conscience, and if they will not to punish them in their goods, liberties, or lives? this we hold in the negative.

Robert Barclay

#74. 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

#75. Terrorism is escalating to the point that Americans soon may have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive means of protection.

William S. Cohen

#76. Liberals say they are for civil liberties and personal freedom, but they continue to advocate government regulation of business, redistribution of wealth, and various forms of social engineering to manipulate human relationships and attitudes.

Richard Ebeling

#77. That's what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don't tell her. You have to remember always that she's the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.

Michael Morpurgo

#78. Using a broad brushstroke, I think Libertarian - most of America are socially accepting and fiscally responsible. I'm in that category. I think, broadly speaking, that's a Libertarian. A Libertarian is going to be somebody who's really strong on civil liberties.

Gary Johnson

#79. We need to give them [the Justice Department] as much power as we can without eroding fundamental liberties.

Jeff Sessions

#80. If there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.

Abraham Lincoln

#81. The legal system we have and the rule of law are far more responsible for our traditional liberties than any system of one man one vote. Any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law.

Margaret Thatcher

#82. Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

Jonah Goldberg

#83. At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

Louis D. Brandeis

#84. No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.

Wendell Phillips

#85. The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.

John Adams

#86. When a juvenile commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity.

Anthony Kennedy

#87. Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.

Thomas Frank

#88. It only takes five people in black robes to determine such crucial issues for our country as abortion, pornography, same-sex 'marriage,' and religious liberties.

Richard Land

#89. This is a time when the protections of Americans' liberties are directly at risk, as are the checks and balances that have served to constrain abuses of power for more than 200 years. The Supreme Court is relied upon by all of to us protect our fundamental rights.

Patrick Leahy

#90. I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#91. In the defense of civil liberties there can be no exceptions, or there will soon be many.

A.J. Muste

#92. Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.

Vladimir Lenin

#93. Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not know what a palladium is, but I am sure it is a good thing!

Mark Twain

#94. I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals. I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in the schools.

Jack Kemp

#95. The truth is our country, our people, our liberties, and our way of life are under attack by radical Islamic terrorists who kill and destroy in the name of religion.

Saxby Chambliss

#96. At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.

Josh Hutcherson

#97. Our liberties, our values, all for which America stands is safe today because brave men and women have been ready to face the fire at freedom's front. And we thank God for them.

Ronald Reagan

#98. We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.

Paul Broun

#99. 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

#100. The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

Michel Foucault