Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The unexamined life, said Socrates,
is unfit to be lived by man.
This is the virtue of liberty, and
the ground on which we may justify our belief in it,
that it tolerates error in order to serve truth."

~ Walter Lippmann  

"We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty
if we expect our republic permanently to endure.
Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite
to efficient service to the public.
Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life;
it matters not how brilliant his capacity."

~ Theodore Roosevelt  

"You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress,
and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress
is freedom of utterance in danger...
Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed,
and when it is needed it is most vital to justice."

~ William Allen White  

"Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible."

~ Norman Thomas  

"We are so concerned to flatter
the majority that we lose sight
of how very often it is necessary,
in order to preserve freedom
for the minority,
let alone for the individual,
to face that majority down."

~ William F. Buckley, Jr.  

"What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?"

~ William Winwood Reade  

"Men willingly believe what they wish."

~ Gaius Julius Caesar  

"If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed."

~ Khalil Gibran  

"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  

"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  

"If you see a man approaching you
with the obvious intent of doing you good,
you should run for your life."

~ Henry David Thoreau  

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress
that can beguile the brain and soul of man.
From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing.
She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray.
But when once the fierce heat
of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned
into the victim's heart,
he will know no other smile but hers."

~ Clarence S. Darrow  

"Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"[A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton."

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley