Top 100 Quotes About Liberty And Freedom
#1. No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.
Jeffrey Tucker
#2. We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.
Ronald Reagan
#3. It is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.
Ludwig Von Mises
#4. Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution. And whether the cause is justice for the persecuted, compassion for the needy and the sick, or mercy for the child waiting to be born, there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action.
Mitt Romney
#5. Our long-term security depends on our deep faith in liberty. And we'll continue to promote freedom around the world.
George W. Bush
#6. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable.
Steve Maraboli
#7. Liberty is more precious than money or office; and we should be vigilant lest we purchase wealth or place at the price of inner freedom.
John Lancaster Spalding
#8. It has been forever that people aspire towards liberty and rejoiced averytime they lost it. The mortals never loved with passion except those who handcuffed them . And whom they turn into myth? The executioners of their freedom
Cioran
#9. History may well record that we served liberty and saved freedom when we undertook a crash program in the field of education ... I hope this bill is only the forerunner of better things to come.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#10. 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
#11. I'm a conservative. I believe in the idea of freedom and liberty, but more importantly, look at my voting background. I voted against bailing out Wall Street. I voted against, never voted for, a tax increase.
Kevin McCarthy
#12. Independence used to be the ticket for liberty. But today, security and freedom, whether it's in the Arab Spring, whether it's in Iraq or whether it's right here in the United States, means working cooperatively and interdependently with others.
Benjamin Barber
#13. Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends
Alexis De Tocqueville
#14. Liberty is too precious to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say, 'I'm free'.
Sidney Buchman
#15. Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let's all cry: "Peace, freedom and liberty!
Carl William Brown
#16. I wish not to tell you how I feel,
I choose silence so that you leave,
Kiss me goodbye and set me free...
Sanhita Baruah
#17. For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their 'freedom deficit' signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies.
Elliott Abrams
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.
James H. Billington
#21. Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.
Henry Cabot Lodge
#22. Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it; for such a city may always justify rebellion in the name of liberty and its ancient institutions.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#23. You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.
Stefan Molyneux
#24. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
#25. You don't know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don't know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!
Gustav Landauer
#26. 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
#27. A splendid storehouse of integrity and freedom has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this day of confusion, of peril to liberty, our high duty is to see that this storehouse is not robbed of its contents.
Herbert Hoover
#28. There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.
They used to be priests, and now they're leftists.
Stefan Molyneux
#29. Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
John Stuart Mill
#30. The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element - learning.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#31. Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
Albert Camus
#33. Nothing will ruin the country if the people themselves will undertake its safety; and nothing can save it if they leave that safety in any hands but their own.
Daniel Webster
#34. How to obtain freedom has been, and is, mankind's most important quest.
John Pugsley
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. If we hold true to our ideals and our commitment to freedom, this generation of servicemen and women will have extended liberty to the Iraqi people, just as previous generations of Americans have all across the globe.
Jim Talent
#38. 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
#39. Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it.
Thomas Jefferson
#40. 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
#41. The terrorist attacks upon our country changed the way that we live forever and provided us with a cruel reminder that freedom and liberty have a price.
Jo Ann Davis
#42. The Freedom Bell in Berlin is, like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, a symbol which reminds us that freedom does not come about of itself. It must be struggled for and then defended anew every day of our lives.
Angela Merkel
#43. From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty
As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope of the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, -
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, -
A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die.
William Shakespeare
#44. Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered.
Bryant McGill
#45. 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
#46. No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
Ludwig Von Mises
#47. In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one's rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.
Bernard B. Kerik
#48. How can we live in freedom and maintain that we are entitled to *anything* that we can't get without the labor of others? Remember, if we are entitled to the labor of others, that makes slaves of those others.
Marilyn Vos Savant
#49. I believe in religious liberty. I believe in freedom of speech. I believe in working hard and playing by the rules. I'm showing up for work tomorrow.
William J. Clinton
#50. What we can see in most societies is the gravity of suffering, tears of sorrow and nightmares of hopelessness.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#51. True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us
D. A. Carson
#52. A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
Milton Friedman
#53. 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
#54. Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by.
A.E. Samaan
#55. [I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.
John Adams
#56. Wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Robert Higgs
#58. Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
James F. Cooper
#59. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
Frederick Douglass
#60. Freedom possesses many meanings. It speaks not merely in terms of political and religious liberty but also in terms of economic and social progress.
Robert Kennedy
#61. There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about.
Ludwig Von Mises
#62. Jesus Christ was a patriot! His country was the world. His laws were the eternal principles of liberty, and his followers, in every age, have been the chosen champions of freedom!
Orson F. Whitney
#63. Balancing the common good with the freedom and liberty to exercise that individuality has been and remains a challenge for those committed to democracy while understanding that the polis ensures our participation and therefore our citizenship.
David Blunkett
#64. Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.
Clarence Thomas
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. My generation of Americans, the scions of daring dreamers, the children of the fearlessly faithful and the offspring of many of history's most audacious actors - we, together, drink deeply from wells of freedom, liberty and opportunity that we did not dig.
Cory Booker
#70. But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought Of freedom, in that hope itself possess All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength, The scorn of danger, and united hearts, The surest presage of the good they seek.
William Cowper
#71. Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
Thomas Jefferson
#72. As a preacher who has spent significant time in churches and houses of worship all across the country, I can tell you firsthand that religious liberty and freedom are principles that can never be infringed upon.
Al Sharpton
#73. President George Washington's namesake capital, once a marketplace for slave auctions, is now synonymous with democracy and freedom; so is the iconic Jefferson, who wanted to build an "Empire of Liberty" for the world.
Patrick Mendis
#74. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
Ronald Reagan
#75. What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights.
B.R. Ambedkar
#76. Will is wish, and liberty is power.
Voltaire
#77. Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary line and adding to one's liberty.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#78. The more people come together, the more borders will be opened and people and opinions get together, the more unrenouncable tolerance will be a fundamental part of our social life. Without tolerance there is no religious liberty, no freedom of conscience and no freedom of thought.
Thomas Klestil
#79. Men who are scandalized at the lack of freedom in Russia do not ask themselves how real is liberty among the poor, the weak, and the ignorant in capitalist society.
Emily Greene Balch
#80. The difference between Nazism and Communism is just the size of the leader's moustache.
Adriano Bulla
#81. I tell you the truth: if I lived in a country where there was no day appointed for elections, I would become a revolutionary, if not a terrorist. And that is because I love liberty too much; without liberty a man is not a man. He has no dignity.
Silvio Berlusconi
#82. 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
#83. Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.
Robert Hugh Benson
#84. The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
James Madison
#85. Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together: And it is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them. It produces excellent writers, and encourages men of fine genius.
Benjamin Franklin
#86. Because of our freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. People assume the most important word in that sentence is 'freedom,' when, in fact, it is 'pursue.' If we don't pursue life, we are just as free to waste it. Our averageness is the degree to which we fail to attempt that pursuit.
Ryan Quinn
#87. Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts, and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.
Baruch Spinoza
#88. We've been blessed with the opportunity to stand for something - for liberty and freedom and fairness. And these are things worth fighting for, worth devoting our lives to.
Ronald Reagan
#89. We Libertarians believe in "Limited Government" precisely because we believe in unlimited liberty. Reduce one, and you decrease the other.
A.E. Samaan
#90. I am not going to talk about patriotism, duty, liberty, and the defense of freedom because that's all dung to a soldier.
David Gemmell
#91. We are in this business, whether it be intelligence or the government, to protect freedom, democracy and liberty, not to violate that.
John O. Brennan
#92. The Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.
Tommy Franks
#93. We see our liberties curtailed more and more and more.We see a tremendous attack on religious freedom.
Rafael Cruz
#94. 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
#95. Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty.
Harry S. Truman
#96. It's not about contraception. It's about economic liberty, it's about freedom of speech, it's about freedom of religion, it's about government control of your lives and it's got to stop!
Rick Santorum
#97. We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes - one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
Stephen Jay Gould
#98. President Obama orders religious organizations to violate their conscience. I will defend religious liberty and overturn regulations that trample on our first freedom.
Mitt Romney
#99. Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.
John F. Kennedy
#100. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
Murray N. Rothbard
