quotations about liberty
You are welcome to your dainties; but for me, a dry crust with liberty against a king's luxury with a chain.
THOMAS JAMES
Aesop's Fables: A New Version, Chiefly from Original Sources
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
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
The whole notion, the whole concept of individual liberty is gone. The whole concept of limited government is gone. The whole concept of the Bill of Rights, the whole concept that the purpose of the Constitution is to limit the government, not limit the people. If you're on the verge of thinking we're losing that, then to me, that's it. That's ballgame. That's nutshell.
RUSH LIMBAUGH
The Rush Limbaugh Show, May 5, 2016
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Circular to the States, May 9, 1753
Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.
ISAIAH BERLIN
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
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 is a principle; its community is its security; exclusiveness is its doom.
LOUIS KOSSUTH
Select Speeches of Kossuth
What is liberty? The measure of dignity.
GIANNINA BRASCHI
Yo-Yo Boing!
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
KHALIL GIBRAN
The Vision
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Man and Superman
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
Half-liberty comes with wisdom, full liberty with death.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
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
A people contending for life and liberty are seldom disposed to look with a favorable eye upon either men or measures whose passions, interests or consequences will clash with those inestimable objects.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to General Thomas, Jul. 23, 1775
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
Liberty is beyond all price.
JUSTINIAN II
attributed, Day's Collacon
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