On Liberty Quotes

Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken.

In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity and love.

...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

You can permit yourself any liberty in the opening except the luxury of a passive position.

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.

No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

It is a fact beyond question that there are two kinds of Christian experience, one of which is an experience of bondage, and the other an experience of liberty.

I have always compared our traditions of liberty, like those of Abraham Lincoln and Ho Chi Minh.

For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats.

Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.

Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness.

While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.

We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.

The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

There is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves.

The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty.

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.

Liberty is the soul's right to breathe.

The tidal wave of God's providence is carrying liberty throughout the globe.

The spark of liberty in the mind and spirit of man cannot be long extinguished; it will break into flames that will destroy every coercion which seems to limit it.

The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

I will live and die by this testimony: that I loved a good conscience; that I never invaded another man's liberty; and that I preserved my own.

America is a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.

Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.

What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.

Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people.

The moment that law is destroyed, liberty is lost, and men, left free to enter upon the domains of each other, destroy each other's rights, and invade the field of each other's liberty.

The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments.

Laws are the very bulkwarks of liberty; they define every man's rights, and defend the individual liberties of all men.

I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost.

I have dashed across continents and oceans as a fugitive and have matched my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive me of one of the greatest blessings man can have-liberty.

Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.

Heroes did not make our liberties; they but reflected and illustrated them.

Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.

Contact with the affairs of state is one of the most corrupting of the influences to which men are exposed.

We live in a free country. While patriotism is important, liberty of thought and liberty of expression are even more important.

Claiming for ourselves liberty of conscience, liberty to worship, we shall see to it that every other individual enjoys the same right.

It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age.

Every word of [the Constitution] decides a question between power and liberty.

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by Power. In America ... charters of power [are] granted by liberty.

The best service that can be rendered to a Country, next to that of giving it liberty, is in diffusing the mental improvement equally essential to the preservation, and the enjoyment of the blessing.

The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.

[Religious liberty was] in its nature an inalienable right ... because the opinions of men, depending only upon the evidence contemplated by their minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men.

[Restraints on the press] in all ages, have debauched morals, depressed liberty, shackled religion, supported despotism, and deluged the scaffold with blood.