Liberty Quotes

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

~ Plato

I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra

~ José Rizal

Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.

~ Naomi Wolf

And I wonder how Gage knew this is what my soul has craved. He turns me to face him, his eyes searching. It occurs to me that no one in my life has ever concerned himself so thoroughly with my happiness.

~ Lisa Kleypas

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

~ Sigmund Freud

A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.

~ Ronald Reagan

Asking an eight-year-old girl if something is a little over-the-top is like asking a Texan if there are too many jalapenos in the salsa. The answer is always no. -Liberty Jones

~ Lisa Kleypas

His kisses tapped into deep mines of memory, and the years that had separated us fell away as if they were nothing.

~ Lisa Kleypas

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

~ John Locke

Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

~ Christopher Hitchens

The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

~ James Madison

Rights mean you have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor....I, in a way, don’t like to use those terms: gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious rights. There’s only one type of right. It’s the right to your liberty.

~ Ron Paul

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.

~ Thomas Jefferson

If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.

~ Graceanne A. Decandido

Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law...

~ Martin Luther

So if you were dating the UPS guy, he could buy you whatever the hell he wanted. But I cant.well...yes, but I'd never date the UPS guy. Those brown shorts are just not a turn-on for me.

~ Lisa Kleypas

Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] ... by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks ... to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.

~ Winston S. Churchill

Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

~ John Stuart Mill

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?

~ Gerry Spence

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.

~ Thomas Szasz

All utopias are dystopias. The term dystopia was coined by fools that believed a utopia can be functional.

~ A.e. Samaan

You're so full of it, darlin'.

~ Lisa Kleypas

For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.

~ Thomas Paine

But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt,And by thir vices brought to servitude,Than to love Bondage more than Liberty,Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty

~ ;John Milton

I think you could probably thaw out a glacier, honey. -Hardy Cates

~ Lisa Kleypas

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.

~ Man Ray

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

~ Franz Kafka

There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings

~ Alfred De Musset

From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

~ Victor Hugo

I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.

~ Edward Snowden

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

~ Henry David Thoreau

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.

~ James Madison

To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes imposs

~ Salman Rushdie

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.

~ Benjamin Rush

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced sil

~ Louis D. Brandeis