Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

~ George Orwell  

"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice."

~ Johann von Schiller  

"None can love freedom but good men;
the rest love not freedom, but license,
which never hath more scope than under tyrants."

~ John Milton  

"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies
that could someday facilitate a police state."

~ Bruce Schneier  

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."

~ Daniel Webster  

"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations."

~ George S. Boutwell  

"I heartily accept the motto,
that government is best which governs least ...
Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,
that government is best which governs not at all;
and when men are prepared for it,
that will be the kind of government which they will have."

~ Henry David Thoreau  

"Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality,
an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance.
Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it.
There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it.
The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent.
It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects,
indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. "

~ John Adams  

"Freedom is not worth living if it does not connote freedom to err.
It passes my comprehension how human beings,
be they ever so experienced and able,
can delight in depriving other human beings of that previous right."

~ Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi  

"Make yourselves sheep
and the wolves will eat you."

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."

~ Bertrand de Jouvenel  

"I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny.
For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord,
the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign."

~ Cato the Younger  

"The basis of a democratic state is liberty."

~ Aristotle  

"The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and
to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty."

~ Arthur Lee  

"Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint;
the more restraint on others to keep off from us,
the more liberty we have."

~ Daniel Webster