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Liberty has no crueler enemy than license.
-Proverb
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Liberty is God's gift, liberties the devil s.
-Proverb
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
-Henry Adams
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I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geograhy, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
-John Adams
Letter to Abigail Adams (May 12, 1780), May 12, 1780
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Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, the right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. Those are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
-Samuel Adams
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The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.
-Margot Asquith
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I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
-Mikhail Bakunin
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You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
-William Blake
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Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
-Louis D. Brandeis
Olmstead vs. United States, 1928
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There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
-Andre Breton
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In commemoration of the fact that France was our ally in securing independence the citizens of that nation joined with the citizens of the United States in placing in New York harbor an heroic statue representing Liberty enlightening the world. What course shall our nation pursue? Send the statue of Liberty back to France and borrow from England a statue of William the Conqueror?
-William Jennings Bryan
speech regarding the the United States' conquering of the Philippines, February 14, 1899
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Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites...
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
-Edmund Burke
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The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.
-Edmund Burke
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Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.
-Edmund Burke
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The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.
-Edmund Burke
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The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
-Edmund Burke
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It is not one man nor a million, but the spirit of liberty that must be preserved. The waves which dash upon the shore are, one by one, broken, but the ocean conquers nevertheless. It overwhelms the Armada, it wears out the rock. In like manner, whatever the struggle of individuals, the great cause will gather strength.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Peace is liberty in tranquillity.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.
-John Philpot Curran
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We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
-Angela Y. Davis
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In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
-Will Durant
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By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Concord Hymn
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One's liberty should end when it becomes the curse of his neighbor.
-Frederick Farrar
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Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
-Harry Emerson Fosdick
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Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Books about Liberty
