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
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
May the Lord level in the dust those who would deprive the people of their liberty.
JOHN HAMPDEN
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Man and Superman
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
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
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
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
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
Every man derives his right to life and liberty from God.
H. BINGHAM
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
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
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
Liberty is life; slavery is death.
A. VINET
attributed, Day's Collacon