Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Liberty.
Liberty consists in wholesome restraint.
Daniel Webster
Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
Andre Breton
I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
Woodrow Wilson
In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.
Christopher Hitchens
It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you.
M. Grundler
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
George Santayana
Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law...
Martin Luther King Jr.
License they mean when they cry liberty.
John Milton
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.
John Ruskin
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Liberation is not deliverance.
Victor Hugo
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin, in the Penn.
Thus the scene of the tragedy of Liberty world over must be suffering and discontent among the people. The drama moves swiftly in a torrent of words in which real purposes are disguised in portrayals of Utopia; idealism without realism; slogans, phrases and statements destructive to confidence in existing institutions; demands for violent action against slowly curable ills; unfair representation that sporadic wickedness is the system itself; searing prejudice against the former order; dismay and panic in the economic organization which feeds on its own despair. Emotions rise above reason. The man on horseback, ascending triumphantly to office on the steps of constitutional process, demands and threatens the parliament into the delegation of its sacred power. Then follows consolidation of authority through powerful propaganda in the pay of the state to transform the mentality of the people. Resentment of criticism, denunciation of all opposition, moral terrorization, all follow in sequence. The last scene is the suppression of freedom. Liberty dies of the water from her own well- free speech- poisoned by untruth. In the Epilogue the dreams of those who saw Utopia are shattered and the people find they are marching backward toward the Middle Ages- as regimented men.
Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.
Earl Warren
The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
Thomas Jefferson
But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
George Bernard Shaw
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
David Hume
Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.
Charles Montesquieu
