Quotes on Liberty

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.

We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.

When the State is corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.

In any given society the authority of man over man runs in inverse proportion to the intellectual development of that society.

The best way to make every one poor is to insist on equality of wealth.

You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.

My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.

I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality.

A single good government is a blessing to the whole earth.

In rivers and bad governments the lightest things swim at top.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.

The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.

Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.