Liberty Quotes
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At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. It sets the slave at liberty, carries the banished man home, and places all mortals on the same level, insomuch that life itself were a punishment without it.
Seneca the Younger
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I would rather not be a king than to forfeit my liberty.
Phaedrus
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While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.
Jose Rizal
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Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.
Paul Singer
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The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
Adolf Hitler
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Resolved, That we especially protest against this present attempt to force all the people to follow the religious dictates of a part of the people, as establishing a precedent for the entrance of a most dangerous complicity between Church and State, thereby subtly undermining the foundation of liberty, so carefully laid by the wisdom of our fathers.
Ellen Battelle Dietrick
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Liberty does not mean being given state sanction to force your own ideas—religious or otherwise—on other people. It does not mean being given a free pass from laws you don't like.
Barry W. Lynn
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How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible..... There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.
John Ruskin
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And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea. And that idea is liberty.
Tony Blair
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A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
H. L. Mencken
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The problem for the King is just how strict The lack of liberty, the squeeze of the law And discipline should be in school and state....
Robert Frost
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I have often expressed my sentiments, that every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.
George Washington
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Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but, if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her.
Abraham Lincoln
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Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
Albert Camus
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If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves
Thomas Sowell
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...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.
Albert Camus
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The State is the curse of the individual... The State must go! That will be a revolution which will find me on its side. Undermine the idea of the State, set up in its place spontaneous action, and the idea that spiritual relationship is the only thing that makes for unity, and you will start the elements of a liberty which will be something worth possessing.
Henrik Ibsen
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In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.
William Blackstone
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What is life without liberty; and what is liberty without equality of rights?
Ernestine Rose
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The interest of the people lies in being able to join organizations, advocate causes, and make political "mistakes" without being subjected to governmental penalties.
Hugo Black
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I will tell you whom to vote for: We will vote for the principles of civil and religious liberty, the man who knows the most and who has the best heart and brain for a statesman; and we do not care a farthing whether he is a Whig, a Democrat, a Barnburner, a Republican, or a New Light or anything else.
Brigham Young
