Quotes on Liberty

All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge.

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth.

Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation.

I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any regime except the regime of liberty.'

Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

I don't have to tell you how fragile this precious gift of freedom is. Every time we hear, watch, or read the news, we are reminded that liberty is a rare commodity in this world.

Discipline must come through liberty.

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion.

Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.

Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its duration.

Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect.

Conscience is the most sacred of all property.

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.

The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.

I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.