LIBERTY QUOTES VII

quotations about liberty

Individual liberty is the building block of a free society.

WHITNEY NEAL

"Igniting a passion for liberty through classroom engagement", Washington Times, September 8, 2015


It is true that liberty is precious -- so precious that it must be rationed.

VLADIMIR LENIN

attributed, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization

Tags: Vladimir Lenin


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

Tags: George Orwell


Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Circular to the States, May 9, 1753


Liberty is a principle; its community is its security; exclusiveness is its doom.

LOUIS KOSSUTH

Select Speeches of Kossuth

Tags: Louis Kossuth


May the Lord level in the dust those who would deprive the people of their liberty.

JOHN HAMPDEN

attributed, Day's Collacon


Half-liberty comes with wisdom, full liberty with death.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


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

Tags: Henrik Ibsen


Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Man and Superman

Tags: George Bernard Shaw


Wait until the world is free before you write a creed. In this creed there will be but one word -- Liberty.

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child


Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free. In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food.

LORD ACTON

The History of Freedom in Antiquity


Each man shall do precisely as he pleases with himself, and with all those things which exclusively concern him.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859

Tags: Abraham Lincoln


The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.

WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS

Beauharnais v. Illinois


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


Every man derives his right to life and liberty from God.

H. BINGHAM

attributed, Day's Collacon


Liberty is life; slavery is death.

A. VINET

attributed, Day's Collacon


Liberty is the soul's right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.

JOSE MARTI

My Race


Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice. If they knew its charms, the dignity that accompanies it, how much a free man feels like a king, the perpetual inner light that is produced by decorous self-awareness and realization, perhaps there would be no greater friends of freedom than those who are its worst enemies.

JOSE MARTI

My Race

Tags: Jose Marti


True liberty is not liberty to do evil as well as good.

JOHN WINTHROP

attributed, Day's Collacon