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.  
 
As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs.
-- Sir Arthur Keith		 
The highest result of education is tolerance.
-- Helen Keller		 
Security is mostly superstition.
-- Helen Keller		 
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
-- Helen Keller		 
No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.
-- Helen Keller		 
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
-- Helen Keller		 
I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
-- Helen Keller		 
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
-- Helen Keller		 
To say "I have to" is to speak the language of compulsion, duty, authority -- the language of injunctions imposed on us from without. Objectivism is not a duty ethic, but an ethic of values, the ultimate value being one's own life and happiness. The language of values is "I want" and "I will": I want this, and I will do what it takes to get it.
-- David Kelley		 
Dividing the political positions into liberal versus conservative is itself a leading example of [an old conceptual framework that organizes the world into categories and stereotypes] shared by journalists and media activists alike. As a result, it has taken decades for libertarians in the United States to break through this conventional view of the political spectrum and gain recognition as a distinct point of view. Over and above any hostility journalists had to free-market views, there was no conceptual space within their conventional wisdom for a political philosophy that combined free markets and free minds.
-- David Kelley		 
The case for a free society rests on individualism. ... Every form of totalitarianism has sought control over the minds of individuals, and has understood that it must first undermine the individual’s confidence in the validity of his own faculties. Remember O’Brien’s speech to Winston Smith in Orwell’s '1984'
-- David Kelley		 
The US government devotes massive resources and much sophistication to killing in Afghanistan. Would that it would spend a little to realize that its policies are creating anger. . . . It costs about $1 million a year for a US soldier -- boots on the ground -- in Afghanistan. Imagine what good that money could do if spent to help the Afghan people. A governor in Afghanistan makes about $1,000 a year.
-- Kathy Kelly		 
We have met the enemy and he is us.
-- Walt Kelly		 
Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.
-- Jack Kemp		 
Democracy without morality is impossible.
-- Jack Kemp		 
But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor.
-- Thomas Kempis		 
Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be.
-- Thomas Kempis		 
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
-- Sally Kempton		 
Integrity is the core of our character.
-- L. Lionel Kendrick		 
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
-- George F. Kennan		 
Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age.
-- George F. Kennan		 
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
-- George F. Kennan		 
The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Respondents maintain that prayer must be nonsectarian … and they fault the town for permitting guest chaplains to deliver prayers that ‘use overtly Christian terms’ or ‘invoke specifics of Christian theology.’ … An insistence on nonsectarian or ecumenical prayer as a single, fixed standard is not consistent with the tradition of legislative prayer. … The Congress that drafted the First Amendment would have been accustomed to invocations containing explicitly religious themes of the sort respondents find objectionable. One of the Senate’s first chaplains, the Rev. William White, gave prayers in a series that included the Lord’s Prayer, the Collect for Ash Wednesday, prayers for peace and grace, a general thanksgiving, St. Chrysostom’s Prayer, and a prayer seeking ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, &c …'
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
From the earliest days of the Nation, these invocations have been addressed to assemblies comprising many different creeds. … Our tradition assumes that adult citizens, firm in their own beliefs, can tolerate and perhaps appreciate a ceremonial prayer delivered by a person of a different faith.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Respondents argue, in effect, that legislative prayer may be addressed only to a generic God. The law and the Court could not draw this line for each specific prayer or seek to require ministers to set aside their nuanced and deeply personal beliefs for vague and artificial ones. There is doubt, in any event, that consensus might be reached as to what qualifies as generic or nonsectarian.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
While these prayers vary in their degree of religiosity, they often seek peace for the Nation, wisdom for its lawmakers, and justice for its people, values that count as universal and that are embodied not only in religious traditions, but in our founding documents and laws. … The first prayer delivered to the Continental Congress by the Rev. Jacob Duché on Sept. 7, 1774, provides an example: ‘Be Thou present O God of Wisdom and direct the counsel of this Honorable Assembly; enable them to settle all things on the best and surest foundations; that the scene of blood may be speedily closed; that Order, Harmony, and Peace be effectually restored, and the Truth and Justice, Religion and Piety, prevail and flourish among the people. Preserve the health of their bodies, and the vigor of their minds, shower down on them, and the millions they here represent, such temporal Blessings as Thou seest expedient for them in this world, and crown them with everlasting Glory in the world to come. All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Saviour, Amen.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
The decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is today. Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. … To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures … and the courts … to act as … censors of religious speech. … Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy …
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one’s own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.
-- Donald Kennedy		 
You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun.
-- Florynce Kennedy		 
Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!
-- Florynce Kennedy		 
Big Governments make for small citizens.
-- James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy		 
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve -- and I believe this can be done -- a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
There is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget.... As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
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 to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
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 to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight.
-- John F. Kennedy (Questionable)		 
If we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
... By calling attention to a well-regulated militia for the security of the Nation, and the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fear of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the 2nd amendment, will ever be a major danger to our Nation, the amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic military-civilian relationship, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the 2nd Amendment will always be important.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The quality of American life must keep pace with the quantity of American goods. This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We must use time as a tool, not as a crutch.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics but for our contributions to the human spirit.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Forgive, but never forget.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
But peace does not rest in the charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper, let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace in the hearts and minds of all of our people. I believe that we can. I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
...probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'
-- John F. Kennedy		 
As part of the conversation with student leaders, we talked about the concept of Zero Tolerance. While I appreciate the desire for such a policy, it is unachievable under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The challenge we all face is to find the balance between wanting to eliminate expressions of racism and bigotry and supporting the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. If we value freedom of speech, we must acknowledge that some may find the expressions of others unwelcome, painful, or even, offensive. We can, however, speak out and condemn such expressions, and we can work to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment.
-- Mark Kennedy		 
At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man... is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.
-- Robert F. Kennedy		 


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 1999-2024