Liberty Quotes

I would entertain the apparently fading idea that patriotism that serves the self is greed dressed in the garments of liberty and adorned with the fashion accessories of other associated patriotic notions.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

We don't permit anyone to tell us our business, nor do we wish to tell anyone his. The same goes for moral outlooks. Don't tread on us and we won't on you. We're a tolerant, liberty-loving bunch, we Wolfes.

~ James Carlos Blake

If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

The goal of libertarianism is not to permit people to be free, but to make them realize that they don't need anyone's permission to be free.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.

~ John Stuart Mill

The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.

~ John Stuart Mill

Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: “For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone.” A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.

~ Frankie Boyle

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.

~ John Stuart Mill

The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

To claim that one can be happy without being free is to prove that one has no idea what happiness means.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Except now everything is digital even murder. There is a record for everything under the sun from the moon and back whether we like it or not. The image that I have of the future is that it is very bleak. It is darkness visible. The black dog of depression will hang us all in the end. Considering the life we live, the values we teach our children, what we believe in everything is a movement for change and every pause between words is a revolutionary act. The ‘struggle’ was like a painful mental illness. The liberation in retrospect was either the exit from our slavery ushering us into a novel, brave, bold and brilliant world or a mass hallucination. The political climate in post-apartheid South Africa has gone as far as corrupting liberty.

~ Abigail George

A slave believes that the law should define the scope of liberty. A free person believes that liberty should define the scope of the law.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

The only common good is the common liberty to pursue individual goods.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Politics is an endless, borderless war against individual liberty.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas and differences of opinion, all the things we say we want in a free and open society. So keep ‘em, fund ‘em, embrace and cherish ‘em.

~ David Baldacci

[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook.

~ David Hume

This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: “Let us rejoice.

~ Albert Camus

Liberty is too precious to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say, 'I'm free'.

~ Sidney Buchman

Study after study has show that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively *are* less free.

~ Edward Snowden

In spite of its alluring name, the welfare state stands or falls by compulsion. It is compulsion imposed upon us with the state’s power to punish noncompliance. Once this is clear, it is equally clear that the welfare state is an evil the same as every restriction of freedom.

~ Wilhelm Röpke

Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.

~ George Reisman

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.

~ Gustave De Molinari

Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

Describing current human mindsets reflecting our ignorance and cowardice and non action-oriented mentality:I'm going to do nothing but escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my way out of the harsh realities of Planet Earth.

~ Mark Passio

The phenomenon of economic ignorance is so widespread, and its consequences so frightening, that the objective of reducing that ignorance becomes a goal invested with independent moral worth.

~ Israel M. Kirzner

To live your life without oppression, making love the way you wish, loving those you wish to be with - is to live on the right of the spectrum.

~ Auliq Ice

Benefit is the only blindfold required to convince ourselves that poison is wine. Liberty's comfort level rises and falls with the sympathies of its children. Well, I for one will not collaborate.

~ Fernando A. Torres

Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.

~ Jonathan Rauch

Ultimately, we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not—indeed cannot—fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money.

~ Jörg Guido Hülsmann

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

~ Victor Hugo

Old: Give me liberty or give me death. - New: Give me liberty or give me debt.

~ Orrin Woodward

Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

~ Victor Hugo

The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualised in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

He who let's the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation

~ John Stuart Mill

Be it remembered, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we have not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

~ John Adams

Don't oppress, don't accept to be oppressed and you will live free.

~ Auliq Ice

Mai whispers, “Why did she have to leave? When she was there, I knew where I had her; she was safe.”“You of all people,” Nicholas says, “should know that freedom is more important than being safe.

~ E.j. Squires