Liberty Quotes - Page 7

You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.

Nothing is more likely than that [the] enumeration of powers is defective. This is the ordinary case of all human works. Let us then go on perfecting it by adding by way of amendment to the Constitution those powers which time and trial show are still wanting

Thomas Jefferson

FUCK UNITY! FUCK CONSENSUS! There was no unity or consensus during the American Revolution. We had principled leadership from a small, vocal, minority that refused to compromise on the issue of individual liberty.

According to an original reading of the Constitution and Declaration, the intrusiveness that is an inevitable part of big government is an offense against its people.

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.

Karl Marx

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

Thomas Jefferson

Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.

Thomas Jefferson

Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.

Karl Marx

Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.

Karl Marx

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

Karl Marx

A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.

Walter Lippmann

Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress ofcorpses.

Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul's enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosant of the molds when they are unable to contain you any longer - these are the great cries of Crete. (Report to Greco)

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

Benjamin Franklin

Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?

Alexander Hamilton

People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.

Some capitalism suffers from cronyism. All of socialism is perverted by the crony statism of the powerful few.

The Supreme Court of the United States is no longer a court of law. It is a forum of legal fad and fashion.

Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.

Liberty is only possible on the condition of regularity. We cannot be free and play the game of life without abiding to the rules, but the rules have to be adapted constantly in line with our experiences and the events we encounter. ( “If he doesn't play ball “ )

Erik Pevernagie

And shall I still be allowed to wear ribbons in my mane?" asked Mollie."Comrade," said Snowball, "those ribbons that you are so devoted to are the badge of slavery. Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons?"Mollie agreed, but she did not sound very convinced.

It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER.

The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.

A Socialist State demands precisely the same human symbols as that of Fascist or Nazi, and the same surrender of human liberties if it is to succeed.

Eden Phillpotts

The vitriol and viciousness is the inevitable result of a government increasingly deciding the vital aspects of people's lives.

Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad....A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together…

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

Liberty to the honest man is license to the criminal.

Jury Nel

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

If liberty is abused, get ready for an awkward result

To appreciate how income taxation reduces prosperity form what it could be, imagine a 100 percent tax on incomes. We wouldn't expect much prosperity in such a society. People would have no incentive to earn money. They would devote resources to hiding the little they did earn. No investments would be made. No savings would exist to increase living standards. People's activities would be grossly influenced by the tax. If we lower the rate from 100 percent, the principle does not change. . . If you want less of something, tax it.

Sheldon Richman

It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity.

An oligarchy does not require a good and moral citizenry but a Constitutional Republic does. If we lose our moral compass, we lose our country.

Democracy is the antithesis of liberty. The foundation and cornerstone of liberty is private property and majority rule is thus logically incompatible with this.

Daniel Alexander Brackins

The obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is entrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.

Will there be people who will have the conscience to contribute to the country by changing themselves first? That is the need of the moment.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Life in this form is one-time chance, death is the inevitable consequence for anyone who is born. The record of one’s death is the primary respect one could render to the lost one. Tears of all relatives of missing people are indeed flowing due to this invaluable action by the authority.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

FUCK "UNITY"!! What a pathetic way of thinking. How arrogant of Progressives to think that my hopes and dreams mirror their hopes and dreams. What an absolute bore.... what an total lack of originality or individuality... I believe in individual liberty. I am an extremist on the topic of individual liberty, precisely because I value original thinking and original accomplishments. Fuck unity of purpose. Fuck collectivism. My life is not your life. I have my own path. Get out of my way.

The "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" begins with "life", and "life" begins at conception.

Patriotism is the product of successful systematic indoctrination.

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced sil

Louis D. Brandeis

I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.

Christopher Hitchens

No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Gideon J. (Gideon John) Tucker

It is not in our forming battlements or bristling seacoasts, or our Army and Navy that makes America great - but rather our reliance in the law of liberty and the religious law God has planted in us.

Abraham Lincoln

Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics. Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.

Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.

Abraham Lincoln

[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

This is so whether the said body of citizens or its prevailing part does this directly of itself, or commits the task to another or others who are not and cannot be the legislator in an unqualified sense but only in a certain respect and at a certain time and in accordance with the authority of the primary legislator. And in consequence of this I say that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive their necessary approval from the same primary authority and no other: whatever may be the situation concerning various ceremonies or solemnities, which are not required for the results of an election to stand but for their good standing, and even without which the election would be no less valid. I say further that it is by the same authority that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive any addition or subtraction or even total overhaul, any interpretation and any suspension: depending on the demands of time and place and other circumstances that might make one of these measures opportune for the sake of the common advantage in such matters.

Marsiglio of Padua

...We don't defeat our enemy by giving him a platform to spread the very propaganda they hope will defeat you... You can only have freedom and liberty when others want that for you. When the other side only uses freedom with the hopes of destroying it later once their in charge, it's time to shut them down... They will use our Constitution as long as they need to until they get the power, then watch them trash it.

G. Michael Hopf

State can become threat to individual life, cause of individual liberty.

Kaushik

The only freedom that deserves a name is that of pursuing our on good, in our own way, so long as we do not deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it ...

The Awakening Land" p614 But what in God's name did folks today want to make the whole world over like they were for? In her time in the woods, everybody she knew was egged on to be his own special self. He could live and think like he wanted to and no two humans you met up with were alike. Each had his own particular beliefs and his reasons for owning to them. Folks were a joy to talk to then, for all were different. Even the simple-minded were original in their own notions. They either mad you laugh or gave you pause. But folks in Americus today seemed mighty tiresome and getting more so. If you saw one, you saw most. If you heard one talk, it's likely you heard the rest. They were creacked on living like everybody else, according to the fashion, and if you were so queer and outlandish as to go your own way and do what you liked, it bothered their 'narve strings' so they were liable to lock you up in one of their newfangled asylums or take you home where they could hold you down to their way of doing...

People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting.

If collectivizing highly personal medical decisions is evil, then so follows that collectivized medicine is evil.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century

Charles de Montesquieu

There were those few, and there will be more, who really liked people, loved people—all people. They were the human torches setting aflame the hearts of men so that they passionately fought for the rights of their fellow men, all men. They were hated, feared, and branded as radicals . They wore the epithet of radical as a badge of honor. They fought for the right of men to govern themselves, for the right of men to walk erect as free men and not grovel before kings, for the Bill of Rights, for the abolition of slavery, for public education, and for everything decent and worth while. They loved men and fought for them. Their neighbor’s misery was their misery. They acted as they believed.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

John Stuart Mill

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