Liberty Quotes - Page 3

Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.

In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

Why must we cling to those who walk away instead of granting freedom? We must give the same liberty God gives to prodigals-an ability to let them go-or we'll be perennially bound to others for our happiness and effective service.

Mary E. DeMuth

To refuse any bond of union between man and civil society, on the one hand, and God the Creator and consequently the supreme Law-giver, on the other, is plainly repugnant to the nature, not only of man, but of all created things; for, of necessity, all effects must in some proper way be connected with their cause; and it belongs to the perfection of every nature to contain itself within that sphere and grade which the order of nature has assigned to it, namely, that the lower should be subject and obedient to the higher.

Pope Leo XIII

...the freedom to bear arms may be righteously rejected to encourage the preservation of all corporeal forms of life.

Kevin Alan Lee

...So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!

Solomon Northup

Every man — in the development of his own personality — has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential na

Thomas I. Emerson

Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-.

Anthony Burgess

Congress may carry on the most wicked and pernicious of schemes under the dark veil of secrecy. The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

Patrick Henry

It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies where everyone was not free - where, in fact, the vast majority were not free. It is no less strange that they never stopped to ask whether perhaps the characters which they so much admired were not made possible by the existence of a class which was not free. Rousseau, in whose philosophy were many things, was fully conscious of this difficulty: "Must we say that liberty is possible only on a basis of slavery? Perhaps we must.

Bertrand De Jouvenel

Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don't know about or can't talk about.

Bruce Schneier

Time means a lot to me, paperwork wastes it, and I have always been a firm believer in my right to do anything I cannot be stopped from doing. Which sometimes entails not getting caught at it. This is not quite so bad as it sounds, as I am a decent, civilized, likable guy. So, shading my eyes against the blue and fiery afternoon, I began searching for ways to convince the authorities of this. Lying, I decided, was probably best.

Roger Zelazny

We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Benjamin Franklin

Exactly. We don't belong here. They're not staring out of disdain, Jordan; they're staring out of jealousy. We don't have to be a part of the horrible modelling industry. You don't have to watch what you eat and I don't have to worry about how many zits are on my face. We can be whoever the fuck we want, a type of liberty that a majority of people crave.

Cameron How to be a Girl

For all the enlightened nations that profess a loyalty to liberty, democracy, economy and all the rest, there has long been a readiness to look for a chosen one; as Carlyle pointed out, even the French, those great anti-venerators, those relentless beheaders of Great Men, worshipped Voltaire.

Chris Anderson

[George Everett Macdonald was] a valiant soldier for human liberty.

Clarence Darrow

Be wary of those propagating too much about liberty, ideology, and civility; they just might be oppressors in the making.

Aniruddha Sastikar

We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.

William Graham Sumner

Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule.

William Graham Sumner

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.

Woodrow Wilson

Bureaucrats complicate. It gives them more work to do. It gives them job security. It means promotions as ever more bureaucrats are added to the Ministry of Redundancy.

Sieg Pedde

We do not have to dig deep into history to understand the reality. The examples of Saddam Hussain, who was executed after a sham trial and the case of Muammar Gaddafi, who killed after surrendering in broad daylight, have given enough factual reality to understand the painful truth.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others' labor.

Ludwig von Mises

There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Promote the voluntary family; voluntarism is the only known cure for abuses of power - in politics, the economy or the family.

Stefan Molyneux

What we can see in most societies is the gravity of suffering, tears of sorrow and nightmares of hopelessness.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The price of liberty is labor as well as vigilance.

Carl Scovel

Mr. President; give me back my country. Allow people to have their humanity. If you do not do this, history will never absolve you!

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Let us applaud the howls of the ignorant extremists as we stand on a knife-edge, not glad, but in acknowledgement of the bad, sad, mad gifts that the regime continue to offer us.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty forindividuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also beprotected. Your freedom to swing your arms ends at my nose.

Michael Shermer

The limits of freedom of expression is tautological: it ends at the point where it begins to affect the freedom of expression of others.

Rafael k Nunes

Sovereignty...as understood in the Declaration of Independence was originally, and by nature, the equal and unalienable possession of individual human beings. The original equality of all human beings was an equality of sovereignty; no man had more right to rule another than the other had to rule him.

Harry V. Jaffa

I'm too sexy for a grocery store.

John Carter Quinn Liberty At Last

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

Frédéric Bastiat

Liberty is freedom constrained only by our responsibility to respect the equal rights of others.

Dave Champion

. . . for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Frédéric Bastiat

Either ‘the group’ is superior or the individual is superior. Marxism, socialism, fascism, and pure democracy are all forms that give power to ‘the group’ and then use violence to force individuals to obey the dictates of ‘the group’. The concept of liberty is one in which the individual - in the exercise of his unalienable rights - is superior to every and all powers. That is what the Founders intended. That is what we are supposed to have under the ‘contracts’ of the Declaration of Independence and the state and federal constitutions. That is what I am entitled to as an American. That is what I insist upon. And that is what I will kill for.

Dave Champion

Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.

A.C. Grayling

Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases.

Rousas John Rushdoony

I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality.

Colin Woodard

The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government).

Stefan Molyneux

The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for "men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through.

Emma Goldman

As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others; for his position is a passive one; and whilst passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally selfevident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man’s property against his will, is an infringement of his rights.

Herbert Spencer

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history and the most consoling presage of its happiness.

James Madison

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers. And concerning the struggle of all against all: that is a myth.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Democracy is a suggestion box for slaves.

Stefan Molyneux

The war is against children, and all the other wars are just a shadow of the war on children.

Stefan Molyneux

Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face.

Stefan Molyneux

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

Henry Steele Commager

Liberty! -- Electric word!

Harriet Beecher Stowe

You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.

Stefan Molyneux

It is also interesting to observe that communal ownership violates every instinct of human nature. It destroys initiative, nullifies free agency, suppresses inventive exploration, minimizes the dignity of the individual and makes a god out of an abstract thing called "The State"- to which is delegated complete, unrestricted control over life, liberty and property. . . Like so many other weak systems of government, it can survive only in an atmosphere of a slave state, ruled by a king or a dictator.

W. Cleon Skousen

We are not subjects of an autocratic King, but are citizens of the country contributing to the advancement of our people who pay taxes out of their hard earned income.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

We are citizens who love to fake life than dig deep into our reality to discover the truth and make amends and correct our own wrongdoings, because we are reluctant to learn from our past.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life...The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber...Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful 'sovereign,' on account of the 'protection' he affords you.

Lysander Spooner

There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.

Dalton Trumbo

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.

Mark Skousen

In regard to the so-called social contract, I have often had occasion to protest that I haven't even seen the contract, much less been asked to consent to it. A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration. I've never received an offer from my rulers, so I certainly have not accepted one; and rather than consideration, I have received nothing but contempt from the rulers, who, notwithstanding the absence of any agreement, have indubitably threatened me with grave harm in the event that I fail to comply with their edicts.

Robert Higgs

Freedom is an expensive gift always worth fighting for. Even if it costs us!

Marck E. Estemil

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake

Mario Vargas Llosa

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Liberty Quotes - Page 3

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