quotations about liberty
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
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
address on West India Emancipation, Aug. 4, 1857
Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.
ISAIAH BERLIN
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles
Our individual liberty is the very essence of America. It is what makes America unique. If you aren't free to protect yourself--when government puts its thumb on that freedom--then you aren't free at all.
WAYNE LAPIERRE
speech, March 15, 2013
The whole notion, the whole concept of individual liberty is gone. The whole concept of limited government is gone. The whole concept of the Bill of Rights, the whole concept that the purpose of the Constitution is to limit the government, not limit the people. If you're on the verge of thinking we're losing that, then to me, that's it. That's ballgame. That's nutshell.
RUSH LIMBAUGH
The Rush Limbaugh Show, May 5, 2016
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
It seemed to me much more than the mere question whether the negro should remain in slavery; that it really involved the question whether liberty should be strangled on the continent dedicated to liberty.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
LEARNED HAND
speech in Central Park, New York, "The Spirit of Liberty", May 21, 1944
Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Intellectual Slavery
Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew.
KENNETH W. ROYCE
Boston's Gun Bible
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Antiquity
Still today, 70 years after our country emerged from the shadows of World War II, individual liberty is disproportionately attained and withheld across our communities. We must be aware of the ways, overt or subtle, that those with power systematically marginalize and devalue those without.
OMAR PADILLA & ROB BARRON
"Why Latinos are fighting for one another", The Des Moines Register, June 13, 2016
You are welcome to your dainties; but for me, a dry crust with liberty against a king's luxury with a chain.
THOMAS JAMES
Aesop's Fables: A New Version, Chiefly from Original Sources
Liberty has restraints but no frontiers.
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
speech at Aberystwyth, Aug. 3, 1928
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
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
KHALIL GIBRAN
The Vision
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
SALLUST
Histories
Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
GEORGE ORWELL
preface, Animal Farm