Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly
to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when
all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."

~ Aristotle  

"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."

~ David Reisman  

"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles."

~ Justice Benjamin Cardozo  

"The public welfare demands that constitutional cases
must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and
not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice."

~ Justice Hugo L. Black  

"There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different."

~ Justice Warren E. Burger  

"If there ever are great revolutions there,
they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.
That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions
but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto."

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"African-Americans watch the same news at night that ordinary Americans do."

~ Bill Clinton  

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,
tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  

"Every individual of the community at large
has an equal right to the protection of government."

~ Alexander Hamilton  

"All men are created equally free and independent,
and have certain inherent rights,
of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity;
among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty,
with the means of acquiring and possessing property,
and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety."

~ George Mason  

"America did not invent human rights.
In a very real sense, it is the other way around.
Human rights invented America."

~ Jimmy Carter  

"Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation."

~ John Quincy Adams  

"Liberty, equality -- bad principles!
The only true principle for humanity is justice;
and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness."

~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel  

"The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights... This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another."

~ Milton Friedman