Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
-- The Holy Bible		 
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
-- The Holy Bible		 
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
-- The Holy Bible		 
While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.
-- The Holy Bible		 
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
-- The Holy Bible		 
So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever. And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.
-- The Holy Bible		 
But ye turned and polluted my name, and caused every man his servant, and every man his handmaid, whom he had set at liberty at their pleasure, to return, and brought them into subjection, to be unto you for servants and for handmaids.
-- The Holy Bible		 
Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbour: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.
-- The Holy Bible		 
He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.
-- The Koran		 
The ordinary "horseless carriage" is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.
-- The Literary Digest		 
This is the sum of all true righteousness: deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by. Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou wouldst not have him do to thee hereafter.
-- The Mahabharata		 
[N]one are so emboldened as thugs who, in spite of the law are armed, in confrontations with law-abiding citizens who, because of the law, are disarmed.
-- The New American		 
I may die a beggar, but with the Grace of God, I will not die a slave. I will not be filed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered... My life is my own.
-- The Prisoner		 
If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.
-- The Talmud		 
If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic [i.e., honest Constitutionally authorized debt-free money] should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without a debt (to the International Bankers). It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe!
-- The Times of London		 
[President Clinton] ... ordered the Justice Department to begin studying gun licensing, registration, and collection proposals.
-- The Washington Times		 
Let me get this straight. For the past quarter-century or more, the central government has been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars each year from competent, hard-working, successful people and giving it to incompetent, lazy failures. As a result, middle-class America has increasingly been impoverished while the poor are even poorer. Now come calls for reforming the system, and liberals are denouncing reformers in the vilest language. What planet did you say liberals are from?
-- Paul Thiel		 
Thus, individualism is not antithetical to community. Rather, it can involve free association and a belief in an over-arching harmony of interests. In a free socety, individuals join with others because of love and mutual benefit, not because they are programmed or coerced.
-- Prof. Clifford Thies		 
When you walked through working-class neighbourhoods, you would sometimes see a cop slipping shamefacedly into his own house by a side door.
-- André Thirion		 
For this future emancipation, we have to rule out ideologies that aim at reinforcing the state, the police and controls in general, and at reducing liberty.
-- André Thirion		 
What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.
-- Bodie Thoene		 
If there are those who think we are to jump immediately into a new world order, actuated by complete understanding and brotherly love, they are doomed to disappointment. If we are ever to approach that time, it will be after patient and persistent effort of long duration. The present international situation of mistrust and fear can only be corrected by a formula of equal status, continuously applied, to every phase of international contacts, until the cobwebs of the old order are brushed out of the minds of the people of all lands.
-- Dr. Augustus O. Thomas		 
Welfare mostly subsidizes people in poverty, helping few escape from it. In their hearts, most people who are poor would like to be rich, or at least self-sustaining, but this president never talks about how they might achieve that goal. Instead, he criticizes those who made the right choices and now enjoy the fruits of their labor. Rather than use successful people as examples for the poor to follow, the president seeks to punish the rich with higher taxes and more regulations on their businesses.
-- Cal Thomas		 
A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything ... quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
A good argument diluted to avoid criticism is not nearly as good as the undiluted argument, because we best arrive at truth through a process of honest and vigorous debate. Arguments should not sneak around in disguise, as if dissent were somehow sinister… For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
I believe that there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
[T]he courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.... The mere fact that a school is black does not mean that it is the product of an unconstitutional violation.
-- Justice Clarence Thomas		 
In the beginning, there was nothing. Then God said 'Let there be light,' and there was still nothing, but you could see it.
-- Dave Thomas		 
No government of the Centre would seek powers to imprison individuals who have committed no crime merely on the say-so of "experts" who believe they might commit a crime. No libertarian government would want to reduce our right to trial by jury, to curfew children, to place "anti-social behaviour orders" on citizens, to conduct compulsory DNA and drug tests on all offenders. No government that was concerned with freedom would seek to ban pursuits that harm no one, such as foxhunting, simply because they are unpopular. No government that has respect for its citizens would seek to interfere so intimately with so many of their private activities -- for instance, what right does a government have to tell me under what terms and conditions I may sell my house. The transaction should, quite simply, be none of their business.
-- George Thomas		 
History suggests that the cause of national decline is, as a rule, that the state in the nation concerned has sought to do too much rather than too little. This applies as much to the Roman Empire as to the Spanish.
-- Hugh Thomas		 
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people; we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
-- Lewis Thomas		 
Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible.
-- Norman Thomas		 
The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.
-- Norman Thomas		 
After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement.
-- Norman Thomas		 
All statutes are presumed constitutional and the party challenging the constitutionality of a statute has the burden of clearly establishing that it violates the constitution.
-- Justice Robert R. Thomas		 
Political censorship is necessarily based on fear of what will happen if those whose work is censored get their way, or if they are effecting in persuading a large number of readers to share their point of view. The nature of political censorship at any given time depends on the censor’s answer to the simple question, “What are you afraid of?”
-- Donald Thompson		 
When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
Jurors have found, again and again, and at critical moments, according to what is their sense of the rational and just. If their sense of justice has gone one way, and the case another, they have found “against the evidence,” ... the English common law rests upon a bargain between the Law and the people: The jury box is where the people come into the court: The judge watches them and the people watch back. A jury is the place where the bargain is struck. The jury attends in judgment, not only upon the accused, but also upon the justice and the humanity of the Law.
-- E. P. Thompson		 
After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.
-- Fred Thompson		 
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
-- Hunter S. Thompson		 
It is suggested that the solution lies in the United Nations Security Council. It is interesting to note that each solution it achieves invariably results either in the country involved going communist or vast territories being turned to communist-type socialism. The United Nations is the great Trojan horse within our gates, and we can hope for absolutely no help from that quarter, especially while it promotes and arranges finances, encouragement, and prestige to dissenting groups involved in so-called liberation movements of terrorist revolutionary groups.
-- J. Ralph Thompson		 
Nothing is plainer than that, if the principles of the church of Rome prevail here, our Constitution would fall. The two cannot exist together. They are in open and direct antagonism with the fundamental theory of our government and of all popular government everywhere.
-- Richard Thompson		 
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Must a citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Law never made men a whit more just.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause -- nor any charter of immunities and rights.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
To be awake is to be alive.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ...
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Why does it [government] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe... till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe -- 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which the will have.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
That government is best which governs least.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 


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