Liberty Quotes
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They who are in the highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are the most observed.
John Tillotson
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Critics have stepped up their attacks on the President for authorizing the National Security Agency to listen to international communications of known al Qaeda members or affiliated terrorists during a time of war. The American people expect their leaders to stay a step ahead of the enemy, and the National Security Agency authorization is a critical tool in the War on Terror that saves lives and protects civil liberties at the same time.
Scott McClellan
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While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.
Horace Greeley
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It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. . . . Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learn to ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.
Charles Morgan, Jr.
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The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
John Maynard Keynes
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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
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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
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For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.
Andrew Bacevich
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Liberty, in my opinion, is the only orthodoxy within the limits of which art may express itself and flourish freely-liberty that is the best of all things in the life of man, if it is all one with wisdom and virtue.
Arturo Toscanini
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Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
Albert Camus
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If the minority, and a small one too, is suffered to dictate to the majority, after measures have undergone the most solemn discussions by the representatives of the people, and their will through this medium is enacted into a law, there can be no security for life, liberty, or property; nor, if the laws are not to govern, can any man know how to conduct himself in safety.
George Washington
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Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
William Hazlitt
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We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong - this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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American liberty is premised on the accountability of free men and women for what they have done, not for what they may do.
John Newman
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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
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Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.
Thomas Sowell
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Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution . .
William Howard Taft
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I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death--to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old.
Abraham Lincoln
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Our Founders warned against this. They said don't... that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they, um, get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government, liberty is done; freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there.
Sharron Angle
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The U.S. Declaration of Independence enshrines the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Alas, that is not the case everywhere in the world.
Haris Pasovic
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The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.
George Will
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Sometimes, if I am not in a situation where the truth matters, I take the liberty of becoming playful and making up a profession. I’ve said I’m a chef. I’ve said I train astronauts. I’ve said I’m a fisherman. One time I said I was a spy. The person I was talking to became instantly animated and started peppering me with so many questions it would have been easier if I had simply told the truth. As it was, I had to fabricate a wild set of statements based on my uninformed speculation about what a spy does! But such is the mind of a person who has ADHD—in this case, me—that making up stories comes quite naturally. Some people call this lying, but when there is no harm done, I call it playing.
Edward Hallowell
