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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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The Law of Equal Freedom, as Adopted by The Libertarian League
Since life itself contains the impulse of physical growth and the development of faculties and therefore needs room and freedom to function; and since liberty is necessary to the exercise of faculties; and since the exercise of faculties is essential to happiness; therefore, to attain happiness one must have liberty. And since liberty, being essential to the individual, is also necessary to the race; and since this necessitates limiting the liberty of each to the like liberty of all, we therefore arrive at the sociological Law of Equal Freedom.
Libertarian Principles
Freedom of thought is essential to the discovery of truth.
Freedom of speech is essential to the vindication of truth.
Freedom of the press is requisite for the dissemination of knowledge.
Freedom of assembly is essential for the discussion of public questions.
Freedom in education is essential to the development of correct principles of study and teaching.
Freedom in science is essential to the demonstration of fact, through investigation and experimentation.
Freedom in literature, art and music is necessary for the highest expression of conceptions and emotions.
Freedom in amusements and sports is essential to the fullest enjoyment of recreation.
Freedom in religion is necessary to avert persecution (as, e.g., for adopting and professing religious opinions, and for worshiping or not worshiping, according to the dictates of conscience).
Freedom of initiative and association is necessary for efficiency and economic in individual or co-operative enterprise.
-- Charles T. Sprading		 
Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms.  They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice.
-- Charles T. Sprading		 
And here is the difference between the Libertarians and the Authoritarians: the latter have no confidence in liberty; they believe in compelling people to be good, assuming that people are totally depraved; the former believe in letting people be good, and maintain that humanity grows better and better as it gains more and more liberty. If Libertarians were merely to ask that liberty be tried in any one of the other fields of human expression they would meet the same opposition as their pioneer predecessors; but such is their confidence in the advantages of liberty that they demand, not that it be tried in one more instance only, but that it be universally adopted.
-- Charles T. Sprading		 
The first great struggle for liberty was in the realm of thought. The libertarians reasoned that freedom of thought would be good for mankind; it would promote knowledge, and increased knowledge would advance civilization. But the authoritarians protested that freedom of thought would be dangerous, that people would think wrong, that a few were divinely appointed to think for the people.
-- Charles T. Sprading		 
A reasonable action on the part of the majority is very rare, while the evidence of mob stupidity and brutality is overwhelming. The majority in power make laws for their own financial benefit, disregarding the interests of the minority, and when the weak minority, by adding to its numbers, becomes powerful, it, in turn, does the same thing; thus, by appealing to power to settle their conflicting interests, the conflict would go on forever.
-- Charles T. Sprading		 
When we compare the laws made today and the method and purpose of their making, with those of the past, we find them to be in perfect harmony. It was the law and custom of the past to provide for a class of idlers, it was customary for the powerful to enslave the weak, for the rich to rob the poor, for the unscrupulous to make laws in their own interests, even as it is the law and custom today. Surely it must be evident that law does not have its basis in justice, but rather in custom. To both law and custom, justice is a total stranger.
-- Charles T. Sprading		 
The history of civilized man is the history of the incessant conflict between liberty and authority. Each victory for liberty marked a new step in the world's progress; so we can measure the advance of civilization by the amount of freedom acquired by human institutions.
-- Charles T. Sprading		 
Behold! in Liberty's unclouded blaze\\ We lift our heads, a race of other days.
-- Charles Sprague		 
Men cannot see truth, because they love falsehood. The gospel is not seen, because it is too pure for their loose lives and lewd thoughts.
-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon		 
Print is dead... Get over it.
-- John Squires		 
Anger manages everything badly.
-- Stadius		 
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.
-- Josef Stalin		 
If the opposition (citizen) disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.
-- Josef Stalin		 
The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon.
-- Josef Stalin		 
Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
-- Josef Stalin		 
[After Communism succeeds] ...then, there will come a peace across the earth.
-- Josef Stalin		 
Comrades, I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how. But what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how.
-- Josef Stalin		 
World dictatorship can be established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in certain countries or groups of countries … [and] when these federation of republics have finally grown into a world union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the international proletariat organized as a state.
-- Josef Stalin		 
America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.
-- Josef Stalin		 
One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic.
-- Josef Stalin		 
Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.
-- Sir Josiah Stamp		 
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
-- Dan Stanford		 
The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done.
-- Leland Stanford		 
When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal.
-- Leland Stanford		 
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
-- Philip Stanhope		 
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
-- Philip Dormer Stanhope		 
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton		 
We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton		 
Government is like fire. If it is kept within bounds and under the control of the people, it contributes to the welfare of all. But if it gets out of place, if it gets too big and out of control, it destroys the happiness and even the lives of the people.
-- Harold E. Stassen		 
The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament...
-- State Department Paper 7277		 
No free government was ever founded or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defense of the state.... Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the  freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
-- State Gazette (Charleston)		 
The maintenance of the right to bear arms is a most essential one to every free people and should not be whittled down by technical constructions.
-- State vs. Kerner		 
Disobedience or evasion of a constitutional mandate may not be tolerated, even though such disobedience may, at least temporarily, promote in some respects the best interests of the public.
-- State v. Board of Examiners		 
When any court violates the clean and unambiguous language of the constitution, a fraud is perpetrated and no one is bound to obey it.
-- State v. Sutton		 
Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves.
-- Shelby Steele		 
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
-- Gertrude Stein		 
Man is the only kind of varmint that sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
-- John Steinbeck		 
And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system.
-- John Steinbeck		 
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
-- John Steinbeck		 
We may be thankful that frightened civil authorities ... have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights -- the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.
-- John Steinbeck		 
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
-- Saul Steinberg		 
Law and justice are not always the same.
-- Gloria Steinem		 
No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.
-- Gloria Steinem		 
What is necessary to keep providing good care to nature has completely fallen into ignorance during the materialism era.
-- Rudolf Steiner		 
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable actions.
-- Stendhal		 
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
-- Stendhal		 
They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.
-- Casey Stengel		 
The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.
-- George Stephanopolous		 
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.
-- Leslie Stephen		 
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infintesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness.
-- Leslie Stephen		 
Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster.
-- Leslie Stephen		 
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.
-- Sir Leslie Stephen		 
The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this – justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms.
-- James Fitzjames Stephens		 
So, what the cultural elites are doing is what plenty of other authoritarian and totalitarian societies have done in the past. They are making the cost of telling the truth high enough that a general mass of people will be afraid to declare it publicly or even privately.
-- Jarrett Stepman		 
When you think about it if somebody is a legal and responsible gun owner, let’s say in Massachusetts, why all of a sudden when he crossed the border is he an outlaw?
-- Howard Stern		 
Just as the right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of a broader concept of individual freedom, so also the individual’s freedom to choose his own creed is the counterpart of his right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority.
-- Justice John Paul Stevens		 
The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.
-- Justice John Paul Stevens		 
As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.
-- Justice John Paul Stevens		 
The agency that is so strict on the way Americans keep their books cannot even pass a financial audit.
-- Ted Stevens		 
Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than the freedom to stagnate.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
Newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff -- and print the chaff.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
Freedom rings where opinions clash.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
We in America today would limit our freedom of expression and of conscience. In the name of unity, they would impose a narrow conformity of ideas and opinion… Only a government which fights for civil liberties and equal rights for its own people can stand for freedom in the rest of the world.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow it wherever the search may lead us.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
A hungry man is not a free man.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
It is a common heresy and its graves are to be found all over the earth. It is the heresy that says you can kill an idea by killing a man, defeat a principle by defeating a person, bury truth by burying its vehicle.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in history text books.
-- Jimmy Stewart		 
The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less that the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a “personal” right.
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 


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