Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Liberty is to the collective body
what health is to every individual body.
Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man;
without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society."

~ Henry St. John  

"Intellectual and cultural freedom is
the most important single precondition
for the breakdown of the kinds
of tyrannical and totalitarian systems
that periodically threaten us."

~ James Billington  

"It is incorrect to think of liberty as synonymous with unrestrained action. Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that liberty can be composed of liberty negations, patently absurd. Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the liberty of others is the exercise of license, not liberty. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of liberty. Ideally, government would restrain license, not indulge in it; make it difficult, not easy; disgraceful, not popular. A government that does otherwise is licentious, not liberal."

~ Leonard E. Read  

"No man escapes
When freedom fails,
The best men rot in filthy jails;
And they who cried: “Appease, Appease!”
Are hanged by men they tried to please."

~ Hiram Mann  

"The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

~ Matthew Arnold  

"Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good."

~ Thomas Paine  

"Liberty is always unfinished business."

~ American Civil Liberties Union  

"There is no way; we make the road by walking it."

~ Antonio Machado  

"Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty."

~ Wendell Phillips  

"Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals."

~ Niccolo Machiavelli  

"Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.'"

~ Ronald Reagan  

"We are not to expect to be translated
from despotism to liberty
in a feather-bed."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance,
this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall,
freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."

~ Henry Cabot Lodge  

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

~ St. Paul

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."

~ Voltaire