By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
more Lord Acton quotes
Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.
more Lord Acton quotes
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
more John Adams quotes
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
more John Adams quotes
Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.
more John Adams quotes
Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
more John Adams quotes
And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press,  or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions.
more Samuel Adams quotes
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship he would keep it in port forever.
more Thomas Aquinas quotes
If your library is not ‘unsafe’, it probably isn’t doing its job.
more John Berry quotes
There exists a “fear of freedom” of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate.
more James A. C. Brown quotes
There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
more Dick Cavett quotes
Freedom from something is not enough. It should also be freedom for something. Freedom is not safety but opportunity. Freedom ought to be a means to enable the press to serve the proper functions of communication in a free society.
more Zechariah Chafee, Jr. quotes
The public library is the most dangerous place in town.
more John Ciardi quotes
There is no reason for anyone in this country -- anyone except a police officer or military person -- to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. The only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns.
more Bill Clinton quotes
Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.
more James Fenimore Cooper quotes
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
more Clarence S. Darrow quotes
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
more Alexis de Tocqueville quotes
There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm.
more Demosthenes quotes
My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
more Justice William O. Douglas quotes
The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.
more Friedrich Durrenmatt quotes
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
more Albert Einstein quotes
The requirement of “due process” is not a fairweather or timid assurance. It must be respected in periods of calm and in times of trouble; it protects aliens as well as citizens.
more Felix Frankfurter quotes
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
more Felix Frankfurter quotes
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
more Benjamin Franklin quotes
The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.
more Helen H. Gardner quotes
There is no reason for anyone in this country, anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. I used to think handguns could be controlled by laws about registration, by laws requiring waiting periods for purchasers, by laws making sellers check out the past of buyers. I now think the only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution.
more Michael Gartner quotes
It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action.
more Justice Arthur Goldberg quotes
Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained.  True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests.  In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.
more Emma Goldman quotes
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
more Germaine Greer quotes
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
more Germaine Greer quotes
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
more Alexander Hamilton quotes
Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.
more Alexander Hamilton quotes
The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?
more Alexander Hamilton quotes
Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.
more Alexander Hamilton quotes
The people must fight for their laws as for their walls.
more Heraclitus quotes
If ... our bureaucratic masters are becoming more akin to Soviet-style or Eastern European counterparts, it was rarely seen as a plus that those central schemers had wonderful intentions with their five-year plans. Such goals as "job safety," "equality," and freedom from "discrimination," depending on their definitions, may be good things for society, but they were never intended to be the business of the federal government.
more William P. Hoar quotes
Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure.
more William Earnest Hocking quotes
Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?
more Sergei Hoff quotes
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.
more Eric Hoffer quotes
It is precisely for the protection of the minority that constitutional limitations exist. Majorities need no such protection. They can take care of themselves.
more Illinois Supreme Court quotes
Did you ever hear anyone say, “That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me.”
more Joseph Henry Jackson quotes
Let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.
more Thomas Jefferson quotes
[The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.
more Thomas Jefferson quotes
The concentrating [of powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
more Thomas Jefferson quotes
The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ...
- To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...
- The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and administration of what concerns the State generally.
- The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests within itself.
It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.

more Thomas Jefferson quotes
Quis costodiet ipsos custodies? (Who will watch the watchers?)
more Juvenal quotes
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
more Franz Kafka quotes
It is, therefore, a fact of law and of practical necessity that individuals are responsible for their own personal safety, and that of their loved ones. Police protection must be recognized for what it is: only an auxiliary general deterrent.
more Peter Alan Kasler quotes
Security is mostly superstition.
more Helen Keller quotes
Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?
Expediency asks the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular?
But conscience asks the question, is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,
but one must take it because it is right.

more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes
 Get a Quote-A-Day! 
Safety Quotes 1-50 out of 115
   Next 50 Safety quotes>>
 
Quotes: Index by Author
A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

More Quotations
Get a Quote-A-Day! Free!
Liberty Quotes sent to your mail box.
RSS Subscribe
Liberty Quotes & Quotations

© 1998-2024 Liberty-Tree.ca