quotations about liberty
The premise of laissez-faire is the premise of individual rights. It is the premise that your life and your property belong to you, not to the collective. To those of us who hold this view, a proper foreign policy achieves the same fundamental purpose as a proper economic-social policy: the safeguarding of our liberty. When individuals engage in voluntary, peaceful action, the government acknowledges their right to do so and refrains from forcibly intervening. But when a foreign entity subjects us to non-voluntary, non-peaceful action, the government forcibly intervenes, in self-defense, to repel that threat to our rights. That is, the state refuses to initiate force against the innocent, but willingly uses force in retaliation against those who initiate it (or threaten to). This is how our freedom is sustained.
PETER SCHWARTZ
"Libertarianism vs. Liberty", Huffington Post, June 27, 2015
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, Apr. 24, 1881
There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
True liberty consists in the privilege of enjoying our own rights, not in the destruction of the rights of others.
PINCHARD
attributed, Encyclopaedia of Quotations: A Treasury of Wisdom, Wit and Humor, Odd Comparisons and Proverbs
Liberty has as many chains as an iron-monger's shop, and as rusty.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The basis of a democratic state is liberty.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Oh! if there be, on this earthly sphere,
A boon, an offering Heaven holds dear,
'Tis the last libation Liberty draws
From the heart that bleeds and breaks in her cause!
THOMAS MOORE
"Lalla Rookh", The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore
If there is one subject in this world worthy of being discussed, worthy of being understood, it is the question of intellectual liberty. Without that, we are simply painted clay.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
speech at the trial of C. B. Reynolds for blasphemy, May 1887
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
The most exquisite dynamic is achieved when the common good is served while individual liberty is protected. No kings, no dictators. Us, in charge of ourselves, leveraging our resources behind our highest hopes, while protecting each other's freedoms, shaping our country, forever working to form "a more perfect union".
WENDELL POTTER & NICK PENNIMAN
Nation on the Take
This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Valley Forge
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Sceptical Essays
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty.
MAHATMA GANDHI
The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi
Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty? I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.
PATRICK HENRY
speech before the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Jun. 5, 1788
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
THOMAS PAINE
First Principles of Government
United States: the country where liberty is a statue.
NICANOR PARRA
Artefactos
Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Liberty is equally desirable to the good and to the bad, to the brave and to the dastardly.
JOHN MAIR
An Introduction to Latin Syntax
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France