quotations about liberty
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
GIDEON J. TUCKER
Final Accounting in the Estate of A. B.
A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
U. S. Declaration of Independence, Jul. 4, 1776
The love of liberty is a common blood that flows in our American veins.
JIMMY CARTER
Farewell Address, Jan. 14, 1981
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.
JAMES MADISON
letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798
Liberty ... is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed upon 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 the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall a man.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
If to break loose from the bounds of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worst, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
THOMAS PAINE
The Crisis
The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.
GEORGE SUTHERLAND
Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 1938
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that "all men are created equal" a self-evident truth, but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim "a self-evident lie." The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day--for burning fire-crackers!
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
letter to George Robertson, Aug. 15, 1855
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Archibald Stewart, Dec. 23, 1791
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Unguarded Gates"
An armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics ... without standing armies their liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe.
JAMES MADISON
First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1809
Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Starship Troopers
Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality; an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. If the substance in which this quality, attribute, adjective, call it what you will, exists, has a moral sense, a conscience, a moral faculty; if it can distinguish between moral good and moral evil, and has power to choose the former and refuse the latter, it can, if it will, choose the evil and reject the good, as we see in experience it very often does.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to John Taylor, 1814
For Liberty can be lost by the practical men whose hearts are too shrunken to contain it. Liberty can be bartered away by the greedy minds who cannot see beyond their own day. Liberty can be stolen away by the robber and the brute. But Liberty grows like grass in the hearts of the common people, from the blood of their martyrs. And the tyrants rage and are gone, but the dream and the deed endure.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Toward the Century of the Common Man
Then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from Heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
WOODROW WILSON
speech at New York Press Club, Sep. 9, 1912
Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds -- but with that word realized -- with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
speech at the trial of C. B. Reynolds for blasphemy, May 1887