Quotes on Liberty

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause. He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.

America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?

Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.

Liberty is the right not to lie.

If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.