Quotes on Liberty

Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.

The right and the physical power of the people to resist injustice, are really the only securities that any people ever can have for their liberties. Practically no government knows any limit to its power but the endurance of the people.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.

Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected "radicals" without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity.

At their best, at their most creative, science and engineering are attributes of liberty-noble expressions of man's God-given right to investigate and explore the universe without fear of social or political or religious reprisals.

In what is necessary, unity; in what is not necessary, liberty and in all things charity.

In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.

Liberty is always freedom from the government.

Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury - national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture - we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.

Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that very liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the "general welfare of the people." Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by lusting tyrants to make us bondsmen.

A piece of freedom is no longer enough for human beings...unlike bread, a slice of liberty does not finish hunger. Freedom is like life. It cannot be had in installments. Freedom is indivisible--we have it all, or we are not free.

Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.

Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.

The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

A private central bank issuing the public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army. We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious.