quotations about liberty
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
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
It seemed to me much more than the mere question whether the negro should remain in slavery; that it really involved the question whether liberty should be strangled on the continent dedicated to liberty.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
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
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
For liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands.
JOHN MILTON
The History of Britain
Liberty has restraints but no frontiers.
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
speech at Aberystwyth, Aug. 3, 1928
If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.
G. S. HILLARD
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
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 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
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
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
SALLUST
Histories
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
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
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
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
KHALIL GIBRAN
The Vision