Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again,
and so bringeth much to a man’s knowledge."

~ Sir Francis Bacon  

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

~ Soren Kierkegaard  

"To preserve the freedom
of the human mind then
and freedom of the press,
every spirit should be ready
to devote itself to martyrdom."

~ Thomas Jefferson

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

~ James Baldwin

"Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It's so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world."

~ Ronald Reagan  

"There is surely no contradiction in saying
that a certain section of the community may be quite competent
to protect the persons and property of the rest,
yet quite unfit to direct our opinions,
or to superintend our private habits."

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay  

"Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor."

~ George Stillman Hillard  

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor."

~ Henry David Thoreau  

"The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of America is justice and securing the blessings of liberty."

~ George Will  

"Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies."

~ Giuseppe Mazzini

"The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty."

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe  

"We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship."

~ E. M. Forster  

"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security."

~ Frank Herbert  

"The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself."

~ Joseph Sobran