Quotes on Liberty

We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

Liberty is the soul's right to breathe.

As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: "I want it now is through."

The unpopularity of economics is the result of its analysis of the effects of privileges. It is impossible to invalidate the economists demonstration that all privileges hurt the interests of the rest of the nation or at least a great part of it.

I do not want any patronage, as I do not give any. I am a lover of my own liberty, and so I would do nothing to restrict yours. I simply want to please my own conscience which is God.

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

The Holy Spirit gives liberty to the Christian, direction to the worker, discernment to the teacher, power to the Word, and fruit to faithful service. He reveals the things of Christ.

Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

The wretch who lives without freedom feels like dressing in the mud from the streets Those who have you, o Liberty, do not know. you. Those who do not have you should not speak of you, but win you.

Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.

Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible-from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius [of] our scientists.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.

Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.

The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".

The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so.

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.

[During the 20th century] ... 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.

In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.

We should distinguish at this point between "government" and "state" ... A government is the consensual organization by which we adjudicate disputes, defend our rights, and provide for certain common needs ... A state on the other hand, is a coercive organization asserting or enjoying a monopoly over the use of physical force in some geographic area and exercising power over its subjects.