quotations about liberty
For Liberty can be lost by the practical men whose hearts are too shrunken to contain it. Liberty can be bartered away by the greedy minds who cannot see beyond their own day. Liberty can be stolen away by the robber and the brute. But Liberty grows like grass in the hearts of the common people, from the blood of their martyrs. And the tyrants rage and are gone, but the dream and the deed endure.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Toward the Century of the Common Man
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
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
We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world.
TONY BLAIR
final speech to the Labour Party Annual Conference as leader, 26 September 2006
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
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
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
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 has restraints but no frontiers.
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
speech at Aberystwyth, Aug. 3, 1928
Liberty is a principle; its community is its security; exclusiveness is its doom.
LOUIS KOSSUTH
Select Speeches of Kossuth
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
Then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from Heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
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
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles
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
It is true that liberty is precious -- so precious that it must be rationed.
VLADIMIR LENIN
attributed, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
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 struggle for liberty is nothing but the constant active appropriation of the idea of liberty. He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands still in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it.
HENRIK IBSEN
letter to Georg Brandes, Feb. 17, 1871
What is liberty? The measure of dignity.
GIANNINA BRASCHI
Yo-Yo Boing!