Liberty Quotes
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The American Revolution was a vindication of liberties inherited and possessed. It was a conservative revolution.
William E. Gladstone
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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
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The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.
William Blackstone
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Zealous groups threaten to infringe civil liberties when they seek government support to impose their own religious views on nonadherents. This has taken many forms, including attempts to introduce organized prayer in public schools, to outlaw birth control and abortion, and to use public tax revenues to finance religious schools.
Norman Dorsen
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The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.
William O. Douglas
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Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
Josiah Warren
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We shall look on crime as a disease, and its physicians shall displace the judges, its hospitals displace the Galleys. Liberty and health shall be alike. We shall pour balm and oil where we formerly applied iron and fire; evil will be treated in charity, instead of in anger. This change will be simple and sublime.
Victor Hugo
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Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture.
William Blackstone
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We must also reject the false choice of liberty versus security. We can and must have both.
Tom Ridge
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When governments claim to derive their authority from any source other than the governed, it always leads to the destruction of liberty.
G. Edward Griffin
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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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It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely; freedom to choose evil as well as good; freedom to enjoy the rewards of good judgment, and freedom to suffer the penalties of bad judgment. If this is not true, the word "freedom" has no meaning.
Ben Moreell
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By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property.
Cato the Younger
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It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.
Sandra Day O'Connor
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I rejoice that liberty . . . now finds an asylum in the bosom of a regularly organized government; a government, which, being formed to secure happiness of the French people, corresponds with the ardent wishes of my heart, while it gratifies the pride of every citizen of the United States, by its resemblance to their own.
George Washington
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What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous! What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and falacious! Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to avert the consequences we have but too much reason to apprehend.
George Washington
