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.  
 
You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively -- I am one with the people.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
If you stop struggling, then you stop life.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
We felt that the police needed a label, a label other than that fear image that they carried in the community. So we used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police. And it worked.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
Off the Pigs!
-- Huey P. Newton
 
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
There will be no prison which can hold our movement down... The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
The imperialistic or capitalistic system occupies areas. It occupies Vietnam now. They occupy them by sending soldiers there, by sending policeman there. The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism. The gun in the establishment's hand makes the establishment secure in its exploitation.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.
-- Huey P. Newton
 
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
-- Sir Isaac Newton
 
I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
-- Issac Newton
 

-- Parse Next
 
As a first-time drug law offender, I was sentenced to 27 non-parolable years in prison. The amount of time was based on liquid waste found in the garage and unprocessed chemicals. There were no drugs.
-- David A. Nichols
 
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
 
Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
 
Ask the first man you meet what he means by defending freedom, and he'll tell you privately he means defending the standard of living.
-- Reverend Martin Niemoeller
 
In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.
-- Reverend Martin Niemoeller
 
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
-- Reverend Martin Niemoeller
 
Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
If you have a strong enough why you can bear almost any how.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
People demand freedom only when they have no power.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual … who … can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: `I, the state, am the people.'... Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word “justice” into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.
-- Chester W. Nimitz
 
Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned.
-- Swami Nirmalananda
 
There are…certain freedoms that are like circuses. Their very existence, so long as they are individual and enjoyed chiefly individually as by spectators, diverts men’s mind from the loss of other, more fundamental, social and economic and political rights.
-- Robert Nisbet
 
What gives the new despotism its peculiar effectiveness is indeed its liaison with humanitarianism, but beyond this fact its capacity for entering into the smallest details of human life.
-- Robert Nisbet
 
Very commonly in ages when civil rights of one kind are in evidence – those pertaining to freedom of speech and thought in, say, theater, press, and forum, with obscenity and libel laws correspondingly loosened – very real constrictions of individual liberty take place in other, more vital areas: political organization, voluntary association, property, and the right to hold jobs, for example.
-- Robert Nisbet
 
The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature. [If a president is successful in bypassing the Congress] it is evident that the people are cheated out of the best ingredients in the government, the safeguards of peace which is the greatest of their blessings.
-- Richard M. Nixon
 
Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.
-- Richard M. Nixon
 
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?
-- Richard M. Nixon
 
It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.
-- Richard M. Nixon
 
The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
[T]he State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation -- that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class -- that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. ... it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
It can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.
-- Albert Jay Nock
 
One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom. It ain't.
-- Lyn Nofziger
 
These things I believe: That government should butt out. \\ That government should butt out.\\ That freedom is our most precious commodity and\\ if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away.\\ That individual freedom demands individual responsibility.\\ That government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil.\\ That the executive branch has grown too strong, the judicial branch too arrogant and the legislative branch too stupid.\\ That political parties have become close to meaningless.\\ That government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.\\ That government should provide for the national defense\\ and work to insure domestic tranquillity.\\ That foreign trade should be fair rather than free.\\ That America should be wary of foreign entanglements.\\ That the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time\\ with the blood of patriots and tyrants.\\ That guns do more than protect us from criminals;\\ more importantly, they protect us from the ongoing threat of government.\\ That states are the bulwark of our freedom.\\ That states should have the right to secede from the Union.\\ That once a year we should hang someone in government\\ as an example to his fellows."\\
-- Lyn Nofziger
 
The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly old men.
-- Lyn Nofziger
 
As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom.
-- Lyn Nofziger
 
Another defining feature of therapeutic ethos, then, is the growing tendency to define a range of human behaviors as diseases or pathologies.
-- James L. Nolan
 
...the mainstream media's monopoly on information is over.
-- Peggy Noonan
 
The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.
-- Grover Norquist
 
Home schoolers do not wish to force other parents to home school. Gun owners do not insist that others buy guns, or that hunting be promoted as an alternative lifestyle. It is not the National Rifle Association out lobbying to have government schools read books entitled 'Heather Has Two Hunters' to preschoolers. It is, in fact, the Left that now strives to use state power to impose its morality by forcing all taxpayers to pay for abortions and public "art" that mocks people of faith. It is the Left that forces parents to pay for government schools where they do not wish to send their children.
-- Grover G. Norquist
 
The Democratic Party might be called the Takings Coalition, made up of groups that want the government to take from American citizens -- usually cash -- and keep it for itself.
-- Grover G. Norquist
 
People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
-- Frank Norris
 
In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.
-- Kathleen Norris
 
Where the meaning of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous, there can be no resort to construction to attribute to the founders a purpose or intent not manifest in its letter.
-- Norris v. Baltimore
 
I would have promised those terrorists a trip to Disneyland if it would have gotten the hostages released. I thank God they were satisfied with the missiles and we didn't have to go to that extreme.
-- Col. Oliver North
 
Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
-- Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787
 
There never was a good war," said Franklin. There have indeed been many wars in which a good man must take part, and take part with grave gladness to die if need be, a willing sacrifice, thankful to give life for what is dearer than life, and happy that even by death in war he is serving the cause of peace. But if a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.
-- Charles Eliot Norton
 
The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.
-- Charles Eliot Norton
 
The essence of a free life is being able to choose the style of living you prefer free from exclusion and without the compulsion of conformity or law.
-- Eleanor Holmes Norton
 
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.
-- Eleanor Holmes Norton
 
An unconstitutional act is not law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.
-- Norton vs. Shelby County
 
We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds.
-- Novalis
 
The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.
-- Robert Nozick
 
Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.
-- Robert Nozick
 
To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic.
-- Ted Nugent
 
I think that our American people will welcome a Russian military force for peace-keeping purposes.
-- Sam Nunn
 
'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the milita, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right.
-- Nunn vs. State
 
The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.
-- Sandra Day O'Connor
 
The prima facie evidence provision in this case ignores all of the contextual factors that are necessary to decide whether a particular cross burning is intended to intimidate. The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut.
-- Sandra Day O'Connor
 
Your depth of commitment, your quality of service, the product of your devotion -- these are the things that count in life.
-- Scott O'Grady
 
All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible.
-- Kevin O'Leary
 
Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.
-- Austin O'Malley
 
When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone.
-- George O'Neil
 
Most of us tend to think of “speech” and “press” in the relatively traditional modes of the spoken and printed word… We should bear in mind that – whatever the Framers of the Bill of Rights may have expected – the First Amendment has adapted over the years to telephones, motion pictures, radio and television broadcasting, fax, cable, and is now just beginning to take measure of digital communication.
-- Robert M. O'Neil
 
Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
-- Eugene O'Neill
 
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
 
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every  government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
 
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
 
Bill [Clinton] hates them [refugees] and fears them, especially the Cubans. Bill knows the Cubans are crazy. Only crazy people would flee from a country with free medical care, guaranteed employment for life, and first-rate gun control. The president and his sanctimonious twit of a wife have worked for decades to build a society like this, and here people are taking their lives in their hands to get away from it. ... Let's face facts about our disgusting political opponents. We've been nice to the liberals for too long. They're thugs. The liberal dream is to control people, to oppress and exploit them for some "higher" goal. And how are the liberals ever going to be able to control people brave enough to sail to Florida in a rum carton? ... A civilized society should no more tolerate the presence of a liberal than the presence of a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, it may be argued that liberalism is worse than the KKK, insofar as Klansman only hate some people while liberals hate them all.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
 
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
 
You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
 


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