Liberty Quotes

“I was born free as Caesar; so were you”

“I must have libertyWithal, as large a charter as the wind,To blow on whom I please, for so fools have.”

“What can be happier than for a man, conscious of virtuous acts, and content with liberty, to despise all human affairs?”

“Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty.”

“Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should.”

“The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”

“Let's all cry peace, freedom, and liberty!”

“Headstrong liberty is lashed with woe.”

“The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty.”

“We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.”

“The less government we have the better.”

“A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.”

“It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism.”

“Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.”

“We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.”

“Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant venomous things that are said but, on the whole, we would rather lump them than do away with them.”

“Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.”

“Liberty is a slow fruit.”

“So far as a person thinks; they are free.”

“Wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.”

“The Declaration of Independence . . . [is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man.”

“Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one.”

“The most effective way to find ourselves enslaved will not be done openly. If weakened we will sink gradually. I ask, who are the militia? They consist of the whole people, .... except a few public officers.”

“I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”

“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep he waters pure.”