LIBERTY QUOTES III

quotations about liberty

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


There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity--those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price.

TERRY GOODKIND

Faith of the Fallen


Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


He that has his chains knocked off, and the prison doors set open to him, is perfectly at liberty, because he may either go or stay, as he best likes; though his preference be determined to stay, by the darkness of the night, or illness of the weather, or want of other lodging.

JOHN LOCKE

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Tags: John Locke


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


We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

letter to Lafayette, The Thomas Jefferson Papers


When liberty is at stake, we cannot be too scrupulous; we must burnish up every precedent; we must parley upon a hair, for that hair may be a fibre of the eternal right upon which cling the destiny of millions.

C. R. WELD

attributed, Day's Collacon


It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regards as the public good.

FRIEDRICH HAYEK

The Constitution of Liberty

Tags: Friedrich Hayek


The idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.

GEORGE ORWELL

"Notes on Nationalism"

Tags: George Orwell


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

Tags: Henry Ward Beecher


The cause of liberty is one and the same all over the world.

GEORGE THOMPSON

attributed, Day's Collacon


Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

JOHN ADAMS

letter to Abigail Adams, Jul. 17, 1775


Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.

NEIL GAIMAN

American Gods

Tags: Neil Gaiman


The word liberty has been falsely used by persons who, being degenerately profligate in private life, and mischievous in public, had no hope left but in fomenting discord.

TACITUS

attributed, Day's Collacon


Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Authority and the Individual

Tags: Bertrand Russell


Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

Tags: Charles Caleb Colton


I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J. J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each -- an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being -- they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.

MIKHAIL BAKUNIN

"La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'etat"

Tags: Mikhail Bakunin


What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

Democracy in America


What is so beneficial to the people as liberty, which we see not only to be greedily sought after by men, but also by beasts, and to be preferred to all things.

CICERO

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: Cicero


Liberty is an old fact; it has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor.

EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN

Living Words

Tags: E. H. Chapin