Quotes on Liberty

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security... In fact the true aim of government is liberty.

One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.

The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.

Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.

He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

I have loved women even to madness, but I have always loved liberty better.

Liberty is the first condition of growth. It is wrong, a thousand times wrong, if any of you dares to say, 'I will work out the salvation of this woman or child.

Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons?

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?

I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.

The securest place is a prison cell, but there is no liberty

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.