Liberty Quotes
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
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
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
Paul was Nero's prisoner, but Nero was much more God's... But how does the great apostle spend his time in prison?... We read of no dispatches sent to court to procure his liberty; but many to the churches, to help them to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free... The devil had as good have let Paul alone, for he no sooner comes into prison but he falls a preaching, at which the gates of Satan's prison fly open, and poor sinners come forth.
William Gurnall
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
Walt Whitman
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering. For weeks, Marianne, I've had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced on me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hope. I have endured her exultations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.
Jane Austen
Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
Freedom... refers to a social relationship among people-namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.
Thomas Sowell
We built this [socialistic] society not for the curbing of personal liberty, but in order that human personalities should really feel free.
Joseph Stalin
Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man.
Miguel de Cervantes
In my opinion, patriotism is liberty.
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.
Thomas Aquinas
Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.
Honore de Balzac
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
To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused.
George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
Albert Camus
I'm feeling a kind of liberty to write about what's interesting to me without worrying about what I should be writing about. And that feels good.
Eve Ensler
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
I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.
Herbert Spencer
The chief duty of governments, in so far as they are coercive, is to restrain those who would interfere with the inalienable rights of the individual, among which are the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to the pursuit of happiness and the right to worship God according to the dictates of ones conscience.
William Jennings Bryan
If religion and churches are truly threats to our liberties, how did those liberties survive, and in such healthy condition, all those years of classroom prayer and Bible-reading?
William Murchison