Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself?  There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
-- Barry Lopez		 
Because law enforcement resources have been concentrated on the street drug trade in minority communities, drug arrests of minorities increased at 10 times the rate of increase for whites.
-- Los Angeles Times		 
If the rest of the country had adopted right-to-carry concealed-handgun provisions in 1992, about 1,500 murders and 4,000 rapes would have been avoided.
-- John R. Lott, Jr.		 
The most merciful thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
-- H. P. Lovecraft		 
The most merciless thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
-- H. P. Lovecraft		 
Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
And I honor the man \\ who is willing to sink \\ Half his present repute \\ for the freedom to think \\ And, when he has thought, \\ be his cause strong or weak \\ Will risk t’ other half \\ for the freedom to speak.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
True freedom is to share \\ All the chains our brothers wear \\ And, with heart and hand, to be \\ Earnest to make others free.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
Slow are the steps of freedom, but her feet turn never backward.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
And I honor the man who is willing to sink\\ half his present repute for the freedom to think,\\ and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,\\ Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
-- James Russell Lowell		 
Participation is an instrument of conquest because it encourages people to give their consent to being governed. ... Deeply embedded in people's sense of fair play is the principle that those who play the game must accept the outcome. Those who participate in politics are similarly committed, even if they are consistently on the losing side. Why do politicians plead with everyone to get out and vote? Because voting is the simplest and easiest form of participation by masses of people. Even though it is minimal participation, it is sufficient to commit all voters to being governed, regardless of who wins.
-- Theodore Lowi		 
Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.
-- Harold Lowman		 
If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.
-- John Lubbock		 
All go free when multitudes offend. [Lat., Quicquid multis peccatur inultum est.]
-- Lucanus		 
And they are ignorant that the purpose of the sword is to save every man from slavery.
-- Lucanus		 
The remaining liberty of the world was to be destroyed in the place where it stood. [Lat., Libertas ultima mundi Quo steterit ferienda loco.]
-- Lucanus		 
The liberty of the people, he says, whom power restrains unduly, perishes through liberty. [Lat., Libertas, inquit, populi quem regna coercent, Libertate perit.]
-- Lucanus		 
The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.
-- E. V. Lucas		 
Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000.
-- F. J. Lucas		 
There are no hopeless situations; There are only men who have grown hopeless about them.
-- Clare Boothe Luce		 
[T]he police do not and cannot protect law-abiding citizens from criminal violence. ... This thought may not occur to wealthy people who can shelter themselves in low-crime enclaves and who care not at all about their less fortunate neighbors. But no one knows it better than the police, who scrupulously preserve their own right to carry firearms on and off duty (and often after they retire as well) even while some of them advocate disarming those whom the police cannot protect.
-- Nelson Lund		 
You don't have to scratch liberalism very deeply to find socialism underneath, nor socialism to find authoritarianism underneath.
-- Don Luskin		 
Never — and I mean never — blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy.
-- Don Luskin		 
Whenever the media covers anything I know about in intimate detail ... they always get it wrong. True on the left, and true on the right. Sigh. Double sigh.
-- Don Luskin		 
I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.
-- Martin Luther		 
Peace if possible, but truth at any rate.
-- Martin Luther		 
The man who has the will to undergo all labor may win to any good.
-- Martin Luther		 
Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only -- no matter how big its membership may be -- is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently.
-- Rosa Luxemburg		 
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
-- Rosa Luxemburg		 
Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution…in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
-- Rosa Luxemburg		 
I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it?
-- Peter Lynch		 
Civil libertarians must often remind government officials (and others) that if the First Amendment only protected the expression of popular and agreeable ideas, it would be totally unnecessary since those ideas would never be threatened by our democratic form of government. Our society's commitment to free speech is tested when we encounter the expression of ideas that are disagreeable -- or even offensive.
-- Timothy Lynch		 
We welcome almost any break in the monotony of things, a man has only to murder a series of wives in a new way to become known to millions of people who have never heard of Homer.
-- Robert Wilson Lynd		 
There is nothing in the universe that I fear, but that I shall not know all my duty, or shall fail to do it.
-- Mary Lyon		 
To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused.
-- Lord George Lyttleton		 
Tell the American people never to lose their guns. As long as they keep their guns in their hands, whatever happened here [China] will never happen there.
-- Donald S. MacAlvaney		 
No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
The inescapable price of liberty is an ability to preserve it from destruction.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
Last, but by no means least, courage -- moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle -- the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
In war there is no substitute for victory.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -­ kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour -­ with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.
-- General Douglas MacArthur		 
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
Institutions purely democratic must, sooner, or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
Many politicians... are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool... who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay		 
There is no way; we make the road by walking it.
-- Antonio Machado		 
If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality.
-- Tibor Machan		 
This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one’s happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature.   It’s only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen -­ that is what makes the crucial difference.
-- Tibor R. Machan		 
Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.
-- J. Gresham Machen		 
Among other causes of misfortune which your not being armed brings upon you, it makes you despised....
-- Niccolo Machiavelli		 
Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli		 


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