Liberty Quotes
-
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
-
The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
William Hazlitt
-
They will avoid ... those Overgrown Military establishements which ... are ... particularly hostile to Republican liberty.
George Washington
-
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
William Blake
-
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
William Godwin
-
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras. . . . As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that bad things happen to good people. A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident, risks an even larger loss of life and liberty.
William A. Niskanen
-
While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious not to violate the conscience of others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men, and to Him only in this case are they answerable.
George Washington
-
We owe to democracy, at least in part, the regime of discussion with which we live; we owe it to the principal modern liberties: those of thought, press and association. And the regime of free discussion is the only one which permits the ruling class to renew itself... which eliminates that class quasi-automatically when it no longer corresponds to the interests of the country.
Gaetano Mosca
-
Whatever else the religious Right may be, it is a bonanza for its opponents... Reports of the great terror that is upon us are raising millions of dollars in fund appeals by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Norman Lear's People for the American Way, and others who claim to believe that the religious Right is the greatest peril to American democracy since Joe McCarthy.
Richard John Neuhaus
-
You have to have a multipronged approach and a significant part of that is educating the public and change the culture so that people are less afraid of Arabs or Muslims, more attuned to civil rights and civil liberties issues that are presented, more aware of the security costs of some of the kinds of choices the Bush administration had made, and more committed to the values that America was founded upon.
David D. Cole
-
But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.
Sarah Fielding
-
Wine gives you liberty, love takes it away.
William Wycherley
-
Liberty, finally, is not a box into which people are to be forced. Liberty is a space in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally, only that we can.
Karl Hess
