Liberty famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants.
-- Harry Browne -
There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.
-- Harry S. Truman -
But what is Freedom? Rightly understood, A universal licence to be good.
-- Hartley Coleridge -
Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.
-- Heinrich Heine -
Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel -
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
-- Henry Adams -
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
-- Henry Clay -
Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.
-- Henry Demarest Lloyd -
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind.
-- Henry Grady Weaver -
The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.
-- Henry Hazlitt -
The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken, as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos.
-- Henry Hazlitt -
The future of human liberty ... means the future of civilization.
-- Henry Hazlitt -
Resistance! Resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance!
-- Henry Highland Garnet -
Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.
-- Henry Hyde -
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
-- Henry James -
Every friend to the liberty of his country is bound to reflect, and step forward to prevent the dreadful consequences which shall result from a government of events.
-- Henry Knox -
Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.
-- Henry Steele Commager -
America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation.
-- Henry Steele Commager -
The tidal wave of God's providence is carrying liberty throughout the globe.
-- Henry Ward Beecher -
Vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but of success of any sort.
-- Henry Ward Beecher -
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 -
Absolute freedom of the press to discuss public questions is a foundation stone of American liberty.
-- Herbert Hoover -
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
-- Herbert Marcuse -
Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.
-- Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel -
A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.
-- Herbert Spencer -
Society exists for the benefit of its members - not the members for the benefit of society.
-- Herbert Spencer -
The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him.
-- Herbert Spencer -
Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
-- Herbert Spencer -
The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.
-- Hermann Hesse -
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
-- Hilaire Belloc -
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-- Honore de Balzac -
The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
-- Honore de Balzac -
"Painters and poets," you say, "have always had an equal license in bold invention." We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.
-- Horace -
While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.
-- Horace Greeley -
If a passion for freedom is not in vogue, patriots may sound the alarm till they are weary. The Act of Habeas Corpus, by which prisoners may insist on being brought to trial within a limited time, is the corner stone of our liberty.
-- Horace Walpole -
A few weeks ago we were reminded that other peoples - in particular the United States of America - fought so that we Germans could live in liberty. That we should never forget.
-- Horst Kohler -
What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.
-- Howard Jacobson -
There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey -
I would never rob your cradles to feed the dogs of war
-- Huey Long -
Government should allow persons to engage in whatever conduct they want to, no matter how deviant or abnormal it may be, so long as (a) they know what they are doing, (b) they consent to it, and (c) no one - at least no one other than the participants - is harmed by it.
-- Hugo Adam Bedau -
The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. [Progressive]
-- Hugo Black -
I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says.
-- Hugo Black -
Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.
-- Hugo Grotius -
Most importantly, nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.
-- Ibrahim Babangida -
If you ask me to summarise our mission, I would put it this way: We were a military regime that sought to lay the foundations for freedom and liberty in a complex society.
-- Ibrahim Babangida -
Do everything possible so that liberty is victorious over oppression, justice over injustice, love over hate.
-- Ignacio Ellacuria -
From the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right. A man's life, liberty and the products of his labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities.
-- Ilana Mercer -
The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.
-- Ilana Mercer -
Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.
-- Immanuel Kant -
All unprejudiced persons objectively surveying the grim events in Bangla Desh since March 25 have recognized the revolt of 75 million people, a people who were forced to the conclusion that neither their life, nor their liberty, to say nothing of the possibility of the pursuit of happiness, was available to them.
-- Indira Gandhi -
In this condition of the most devastating humiliation, I still possessed the most precious of liberties, that no-one could take away from me: that of deciding who I wanted to be.
-- Ingrid Betancourt -
Civil liberties victories never stay won, but must be fought for over and over again.
-- Ira Glasser -
The notion of religious liberty is that you cannot be forced to participate in a religious ceremony that's not of your choosing simply because you're out-voted.
-- Ira Glasser -
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
-- Iris Chang -
A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
-- Isabel Paterson -
Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.
-- Isaiah Berlin -
When there is life and mankind, a person will live striving for good deeds, liberty and a bright life, and wish that goodness and justice will reign in the world.
-- Islom Karimov -
I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood - human blood.
-- J. Reuben Clark -
On the essentials, unity. On the nonessentials, liberty. In everything, charity.
-- Jack Hyles -
When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame.
-- Jack Kemp -
Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.
-- Jack Kemp -
I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals. I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in the schools.
-- Jack Kemp -
[Persons] who are recognized as citizens in any one state of the Union [have] the right to enter every other state, whenever they pleased... full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might meet; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.
-- Jack Kevorkian -
Listen, when you take my liberty away, you've taken away more-something more precious than life. I mean, what good is a life without liberty? Huh? None.
-- Jack Kevorkian -
Liberty means more to me than life itself.
-- Jack Kevorkian -
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
-- Jacob Bronowski -
If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger -
The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned - the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach - is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger -
It is commonly believed that the rights of the American people come from the Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger -
If the Czar will not accord our people these desired liberties, then a revolution will bring about a republic which will assure us our rights.
-- Jacob Schiff -
For me, socialism has always been about liberty and solidarity, but also about responsibility.
-- Jacques Delors -
Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the "prebiotic soup."
-- Jacques Monod -
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
-- James A. Baldwin -
Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.
-- James A. Garfield -
If a man who is born to a fortune cannot make himself easier and freer than those who are not, he gains nothing.
-- James Boswell -
The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur.
-- James Bovard -
There is no virtue in denying the law of gravity, and there should be no virtue in denying the limitations of government. ... The more we glorify government, the more liberties we will lose.
-- James Bovard -
Today's citizen is obliged to find his freedom only in the narrow ruts pre-approved by his bureaucratic overlords. "Risk-free liberty" is the ideal of the Welfare State: citizens are permitted only liberties which have been declawed, defanged, neutered, certified and wrapped in benevolent restrictions.
-- James Bovard -
Liberty is a political firewall that limits the damage government can do to the individual.
-- James Bovard -
I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth - matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense.
-- James Bryce -
Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.
-- James Bryce -
Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.
-- James Buchan -
There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters.
-- James Burnham -
Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.
-- James Carriger Paine -
To me this question whether liberty is a good or a bad thing appears as irrational as the question whether fire is a good or a bad thing. It is both good and bad according to time, place, and circumstance, and a complete answer to the question, In what cases is liberty good and in what cases is it bad? would involve not merely a universal history of mankind, but a complete solution of the problems which such a history would offer.
-- James Fitzjames Stephen -
It seems almost incredible that the advocates of liberty should conceive of the idea of selling a fellow creature to slavery.
-- James Forten -
Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.
-- James H. Billington -
Those who attack the rationale of the game, and not the players, are its most formidable adversaries.
-- James J. Martin -
Our nation stands at the crossroads of liberty. Crushing national debt, rampant illegal immigration, insane business regulations and staggering national unemployment are pushing our nation into unchartered territory.
-- James Lankford -
A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.
-- James Madison -
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
-- James Madison -
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.
-- James Madison -
The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.
-- James Madison
