Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Everyone has his own conscience,
and there should be no rules about
how a conscience should function."

~ Ernest Hemingway  

"Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."

~ Frank Zappa  

"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all."

~ Friedrich Durrenmatt  

"Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world.
Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful
political weapons man has ever forged."

~ William O. Douglas  

"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

~ John Stuart Mill  

"Individuality is freedom lived."

~ John Dos Passos  

"Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway, you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion."

~ Marios Vargas Llosa  

"Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free."

~ Ronald Reagan  

"There can be no freedom without freedom to fail."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"A liberal society stands on the proposition that
we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong.
This means we must place no one, including ourselves,
beyond the reach of criticism (no final say);
it means that we must allow people to err,
even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will."

~ Jonathan Rauch

"I have always strenuously supported
the right of every man to his own opinion,
however different that opinion might be to mine.
He who denies another this right makes
a slave of himself to his present opinion,
because he precludes himself the right of changing it."

~ Thomas Paine  

"Profound insights arise only in debate,
with a possibility of counterargument,
only when there is a possibility of expressing
not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas."

~ Andrei Sakharov  

"When individuals and nations have once got in their heads
the abstract concept of full-blown liberty,
there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength."

~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  

"Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance --
these may be cured by reform or revolution.
But men do not live only by fighting evils.
They live by positive goals, individual and collective,
a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible."

~ Isaiah Berlin