Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause
is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are
naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment
by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis  

"Who would be free themselves must strike the blow."

~ Lord Byron  

"Unjust rule never abides continually."

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust."

~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  

"Disobedience or evasion of a constitutional mandate may not be tolerated, even though such disobedience may, at least temporarily, promote in some respects the best interests of the public."

~ State v. Board of Examiners  

"Those who won our independence
believed that the final end of the State
was to make men free to develop their faculties...
They valued liberty both as an end and as a means.
They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness
and courage to be the secret of liberty."

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis  

"A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought."

~ Leon Blum  

"I wish men to be free, as much from mobs as kings,—from you as me."

~ Lord Byron  

"Life, liberty, and property
do not exist because men have made laws.
On the contrary, it was the fact that
life, liberty, and property existed beforehand
that caused men to make laws in the first place."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"Freedom, morality, and the human dignity
of the individual consists precisely in this;
that he does good not because he is forced to do so,
but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it."

~ Mikhail A. Bakunin  

"Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human."

~ Isaiah Berlin  

"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?"

~ John Adams  

"Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country?"

~ Niccolo Machiavelli  

"...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself;
that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error,
and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless
by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons,
free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous
when it is permitted freely to contradict them."

~ Thomas Jefferson