Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
Click on the name to open the full quote and the details about the quote's origin. Quotes are also grouped by Category and Author.  
 
The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
-- Raymond Chandler		 
He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.
-- Raymond Chandler		 
Money for me has only one sound: liberty.
-- Gabrielle Chanel		 
The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues.
-- William Ellery Channing		 
The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot.
-- William Ellery Channing		 
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
-- William Ellery Channing		 
I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith...
-- William Ellery Channing		 
Knowledge is essential to freedom.
-- William Ellery Channing		 
The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.
-- William Ellery Channing		 
Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.
-- William Ellery Channing		 
Progress, the growth of power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.
-- William Ellery Channing		 
No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin		 
At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.
-- E. H. Chapin		 
Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own.
-- John Jay Chapman		 
Our duty, as men and women is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin		 
[T]he sprawl of government into every conceivable realm of life has caused the withering of traditional institutions. Fathers become unnecessary if the government provides Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Church charities lose their mission when the government provides food, shelter and income to the poor. And the non-poor no longer feel pressed to provide aid to those in need, be they aged parents or their unfortunate neighbors—“compassion” having become the province of the state.
-- Mona Charen		 
The people's liberties strengthen the king's prerogative, and the king's prerogative is to defend the people's liberties.
-- Charles I		 
Never make a defence or apology before you be accused.
-- Charles I		 
The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened by convictions.
-- Alexander Chase		 
Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.
-- Mary Ellen Chase		 
The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.
-- Justice Salmon Chase		 
If Congress sees fit to impose a capitation, or other direct tax, it must be laid in proportion to the census; if Congress determines to impose duties, imposts, and excises, they must be uniform throughout the United States. These are not strictly limitations of power. They are rules prescribing the mode in which it shall be exercised. ... This review shows that personal property, contracts, occupations, and the like have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax.
-- Salmon P. Chase		 
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.
-- Samuel Chase		 
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.
-- Samuel Chase		 
For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.
-- Stuart Chase		 
It will be necessary for us to be a nation of men, and not laws.
-- Dick Cheney (False)		 
The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.
-- Dick Cheney		 
[A]fter unleashing the Red Guards … to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them.
-- Nien Cheng		 
Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs … looting and the ransacking of private homes … The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. … Articles in the newspapers … encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were … exhorted to be fearless in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings.
-- Nien Cheng		 
The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names.
-- Nien Cheng		 
Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.
-- Lord Chesterfield		 
It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic--that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Truth is sacred and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back. … The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose power is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
If our social conditions curtail manhood and womanhood, we must alter the social conditions. We must not go on quietly in a corner making men unmanly and women unwomanly, that they may fit into their filthy and slavish civilization.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The Rothschilds can start or prevent wars. Their word could make or break empires.
-- Chicago Evening American		 
David Rockefeller, President of Chase Manhattan Bank, briefed President Johnson today on his recent meeting with Premier Nikita Khrushchev of Russia.
-- Chicago Tribune		 
Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.
-- Lydia M. Child		 
England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland.
-- Lydia M. Child		 
Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one's whole life.
-- Chilon of Sparta		 
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever.
-- Chinese Proverb		 


Daily Quotes
Ready to be inspired?
Sign up for a daily dose of Liberty Quotes!
Leave us your email address to subscribe.
Email:

Here's the Daily Quote history.

Browse quotes by
Authors, Categories,
and Cryptograms!



The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
A classic since 1953 with over 20,000 quotes from over 3,000 authors.


Famous Last Words
Apt Observations, Pleas, Curses, Benedictions, Sour Notes, Bons Mots, and Insights from People on the Brink of Departure


Stretch Your Wings
Famous Black Quotations for the Young


American Quotations
An exhaustive collection of profound quotes from the founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions


The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations


Last Words of Saints and Sinners
700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History


America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations
Contains over 2,100 profound quotations from founding fathers, presidents, constitutions, court decisions and more


The Law
This 1850 classic is an absolute must read for anyone interested in law, justice, truth, or liberty. A most compelling and revolutionary look at The Law.


Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition)


The Stupidest Things Ever Said by Politicians
Rise up, America -- and laugh out loud at the greatest gaffes that no spin doctor could possibly fix!


The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said
Another great collection of stupidity


Quotable Quotes
Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine


The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time
You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less.


2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs
Invaluable sampler of witticisms, epigrams, sayings, bon mots, platitudes and insights chosen for their brevity and pithiness.


Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts Funny Sayings
A stupendous collection of quotes, quips, epigrams, witticisms, and humorous comments for personal enjoyment and ready reference.


Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said
Quick Quips and Quotes is the Ultimate Collection of one liners.


Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.


Quotations for Public Speakers
A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology


Liberty - The American Revolution
This compelling series traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom.


Founding Fathers
The story of how these disparate characters fomented rebellion in the colonies, formed the Continental Congress, fought the Revolutionary War, and wrote the Constitution


Libertarianism: A Primer
David Boaz, director of the Cato Institute, has written a simple introduction to Libertarianism inteneded to appeal to disgruntled Democrats and Republicans everywhere.


The Libertarian Reader
Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman


Thomas Paine: Collected Writings
All the classics: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters


(c) Copyright 1999-2025