Quotes About Liberty

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earlthy blessings - give us that precious jewel, and you may take every things else! . . . Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.

The distinguishing part of our constitution is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate, is the peculiar duty and proper trust of a member of the house of commons. But the liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order, and that not only exists with order and virtue, but cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.

If to break loose from the bounds of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worst, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

Writing, for me, has to do with liberty of mind. The liberty to intuit, assess, be surprised, even to be ashamed and reconsider. To feel the integrity and generosity of words, but also their disruptive violence and volatility. To even begin to do them justice requires a radical letting go and stringent attention. I was interested in following that impulse toward liberty.

Liberty is the first condition of growth. Your ancestors gave every liberty to the soul, and religion grew. They put the body under every bondage, and society did not grow. The opposite is the case in the West - every liberty to society, none to religion. Now are falling off the shackles from the feet of Eastern society as from those of Western religion.

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact.

[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

Liberty without discipline cannot survive. Without order and authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty during which men forgot the elementary truths of human existence. They forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras. . . . As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that bad things happen to good people. A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident, risks an even larger loss of life and liberty.

Religious liberty should mean religious liberty for everyone, employees as well.

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.

Today, the United States stands as a beacon of liberty and democratic strength before the community of nations. We are resolved to stand firm against those who would destroy the freedoms we cherish. We are determined to achieve an enduring peace - a peace with liberty and with honor. This determination, this resolve, is the highest tribute we can pay to the many who have fallen in the service of our Nation.

The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call this ideal underlying. It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctnaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-backed progressivism until it is like a diamond hidden under a monition of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world.

How is property given? By restraining liberty; that is, by taking it away so far as necessary for the purpose. How is your house made yours? By debarring every one else from the liberty of entering it without your leave.

Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. 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.

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

Our Founders warned against this. They said don't... that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they, um, get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government, liberty is done; freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.

A Tory..., since the revolution, may be defined in a few words, to be a lover of monarchy, though without abandoning liberty; anda partizan of the family of Stuart. As a Whig may be defined to be a lover of liberty though without renouncing monarchy; and a friend to the settlement in the protestant line.

If the choice is given to us of liberty or security, we must scorn the latter with the proper contempt of free man and the sound judgment of wise men who know that liberty and security are not incompatible in the lives of honest men.

There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.

I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?

Senate Bill 1062 does not address a specific or present concern related to religious liberty in Arizona. I have not heard one example in Arizona where a business owner’s religious liberty has been violated. The bill was broadly worded - and could result in unintended and negative consequences. After weighing all the arguments I have vetoed Senate Bill 1062 moments ago.

The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.

Any nation which for an extended period puts pleasure before liberty is likely to lose the liberty it misused.

Libertarian presidential candidate André Marrou's idea is that "government power is opposed to individual liberty." Must we still debate such sophomoric notions?... Besides, liberty, although very important, is not the only value.

Man's liberty ends, and it ought to end, when that liberty becomes the curse of its neighbors.

I think we're seeing in the wake of the last election that evangelicals - especially young evangelicals - are no longer inextricably linked to the Republican party. Even at Liberty, there's now some ideological diversity with respect to politics. Last fall, I saw a Facebook group called "Liberty Students for Obama." It had 4 or 5 members, but still...

In a chariot of light from the region of the day, the Goddess of Liberty came. She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love, the plant she named Liberty Tree.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

The quickest and surest way to production, prosperity, and economic growth is through private enterprise. The best way for governments to encourage private enterprise is to establish justice, to enforce contracts, to insure domestic peace and tranquility, to protect private property, and to secure the blessings of liberty including economic liberty - which means to stop putting obstacles in the way of private enterprise.

If I had to guess, I'd estimate that 9 out of 10 Liberty students come to Christian college on their own, with no pressure from their parents or religious leaders. A lot of the students came from secular high schools, and for them, Liberty is a place where they can practice their faith freely without feeling ostracized or mocked.

And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be 'a necessary evil,' and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.

By liberty of conscience, we understand not only a mere liberty of the mind, in believing or disbelieving this or that principle or doctrine; but the exercise of ourselves in a visible way of worship, upon our believing it to be indispensably required at our hands, that if we neglect it for fear of favor of any mortal man, we sin and incur divine wrath.

Speak, speak, speak, & remember that whenever anyone's liberty to speak is denied, your liberty is denied also, & your place is where the attack is.

Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.

Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.

Condemn no man for not thinking as you think. Let every one enjoy the full and free liberty of thinking for himself. Let every man use his own judgment, since every man must give an account of himself to God. Abhor every approach, in any kind or degree, to the spirit of persecution, if you cannot reason nor persuade a man into the truth, never attempt to force a man into it. If love will not compel him to come, leave him to God, the judge of all.

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.