Liberty Quotes
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
Will Durant
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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
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A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
William O. Douglas
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The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it "undermines the work ethic," but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives.
Charles A. Murray
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He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Challenging snow is one of my favorite kinds of skiing, and I like being able to switch techniques at liberty.
Paul Parker
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It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?
Chris Gardner
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Alwasy remember.... We are engaged in a battle for the continuation of our capitalist, free-market economic model; our way of life; and our liberty. The enemy is anticapitalist, believes in big government, embraces collectivist ideologies, and has, over the past century, infiltrated every level of our government and most of the banking industry. They don’t care about patriotism, although they may sport the red, white, and blue and the stars and stripes on their bumper stickers. They don’t care about personal responsibility or civic duty. They don’t share your sense of honor. All they care about is power and control over your money and every aspect of your life.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
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Liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop. You do not do that. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them
H. W. Brands
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When thirsty grief in wine we steep, When healths and draughts go free, Fishes, that tipple in the deep, Know no such liberty.
Richard Lovelace
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No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
Thomas Sowell
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While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Sarah Vowell
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Wine gives you liberty, love takes it away.
William Wycherley
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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
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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
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Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
George Washington
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“The late proceedings of those daring invaders to establish a national religion have opened the eyes of all lovers of liberty and religion... I have been told they have thrown off the mask and are preaching to the people to elect none but godly men to represent them in the General and State Legislatures; ... what they mean by godly people, is people of their own stamp...”
Anne Royall
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The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.
Victor Hugo
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A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea.
William O. Douglas
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Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?
William E. Simon
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Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.
Fisher Ames
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My work is my life, and my life is my work. I invented this assault rifle to defend my country. Today, I am proud that it has become for many synonymous with liberty.
Mikhail Kalashnikov
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Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.
William Francis Buckley
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I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence.
William E. Gladstone