LIBERTY QUOTES IV

quotations about liberty

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

LOUIS BRANDEIS

Olmstead v. United States


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


Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

JOHN ADAMS

letter to Abigail Adams, Jul. 17, 1775


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

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

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Authority and the Individual

Tags: Bertrand Russell


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

THOMAS JEFFERSON

letter to Lafayette, The Thomas Jefferson Papers


The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty--of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

SUSAN SONTAG

Aids and Its Metaphors

Tags: Susan Sontag


Through too much liberty all things run to ruin and confusion. Liberty in the mind is a sign of goodness; in the tongue, of foolishness; in the hand, of theft; in our life, of want of grace.

M. PARKER

attributed, Day's Collacon


A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

GIDEON J. TUCKER

Final Accounting in the Estate of A. B.


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


The spirit of liberty must be cherished, if we would elevate, purify, and strengthen the fibre of the nation.

ARNAUD DE L'ARIEGE

attributed, Day's Collacon


On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that "all men are created equal" a self-evident truth, but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim "a self-evident lie." The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day--for burning fire-crackers!

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

letter to George Robertson, Aug. 15, 1855

Tags: Abraham Lincoln


A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.

JOSEPH ADDISON

Cato

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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

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Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

Critical and Historical Essays


Liberty is potential. To create a free being is to place before it the problem of its destiny.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: Sabine Baring-Gould


A lion is at liberty who can follow the laws of his own nature, who can eat when his stomach tells him, who can sleep when his fierce eyes grow weary, who can scratch long furrows in a forest tree when his claws feel so disposed. He is not at liberty when he lives in a cage, is fed on horseflesh at 4 p.m., and is compelled at the point of a red-hot poker to spell P-I-G -- PIG, in the presence of a diverted crowd.

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Intellectual Slavery

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The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.

MIKHAIL BAKUNIN

God and the State

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Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

LORD ACTON

The History of Freedom in Antiquity

Tags: Lord Acton