Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups
start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both."

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay  

"Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate,
we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love."

~ Wendell L. Willkie  

"Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered."

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero  

"Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits;
it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men."

~ E. B. White  

"Discipline must come through liberty...
We do not consider an individual disciplined
when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute
and as immovable as a paralytic.
He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined."

~ Maria Montessori  

"The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless."

~ Aristotle  

"To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen."

~ Quintus Ennius  

"The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always."

~ R. D. Laing  

"But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies."

~ Alan Watts  

"There is no subjugation so perfect
as that which keeps the appearance of freedom
for in that way one captures volition itself."

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau  

"None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free."

~ Pearl S. Buck  

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."

~ W. E. B. Du Bois  

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy."

~ Abraham Lincoln  

" 'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'."

~ C. S. Lewis