Liberty Quotes

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-George Orwell

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-Thomas Jefferson

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Socialism values equality more than liberty."
-Dennis Prager

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others."
-John Stuart Mill

"The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other."
-Alexis De Tocqueville

"Liberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted."
-Algernon Sidney

"True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all."
-Lord Mansfield

"True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will."
-Jonathan Edwards

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."
-John Philpot Curran

"Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism."
-Barry Goldwater

"If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve."
-Philip Wylie

"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 understand the minds of other men and women."
-Learned Hand

"In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary."
-Kathleen Norris

"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril."
-William Lloyd Garrison

"It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren."
-Sandra Day O'conner

"Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us."
-Benjamin Rush

"Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others."
-William Allen White

"I was not only hunting for my liberty, but also hunting for my name."
-William Wells Brown

"We can afford no liberties with liberty itself."
-Robert H. Jackson

"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."
-Harry Emerson Fosdick

"The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress."
-Ernest Renan

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
-Henry David Thoreau

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."
-Aristotle

"The basis of a democratic state is liberty."
-Aristotle

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
-Thomas Jefferson

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
-Thomas Jefferson