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Liberty Quotes
"In every man there is an instinctive and passionate reaction if his person or liberty is attacked."
50
"I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."
50
"Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa."
49
"One man's fight is another man's freedom."
48
"The sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called Liberty."
48
"To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties."
47
"Freedomis a property of all rational beings."
46
"Liberals are stalwart defenders of civil liberties - provided we're only talking about criminals."
45
"The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny."
45
"Patrick Henry said 'give me liberty or give me death.' I think his famous quote makes it crystal clear that the Constitutional framework of this country values liberty as an essential element of life, worth dying for. If something is worth such a sacrifice, how can the loss of it be justified for the argument that it will make us safer to give up our liberty and our civil rights? Are we to tell the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers of all the soldiers lost in foreign wars that it was all a big lie? That they died for nothing?"
45
"What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity."
44
"Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it."
43
"There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself."
42
"A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself."
41
"Our common liberty is consecrated by a common sorrow."
41
"It is terrible to speak of you, Liberty, for one who lives without you."
41
"For more than two centuries, the defenders of liberty have put their lives on the line, because they have known that we cannot take our freedoms for granted."
41
"The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion."
41
"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."
41
"Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."
40
"What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?"
39
"Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class."
38
"This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it."
38
"I am not interested in having freedom from burdens. I don't need any authority to free me from responsibility.I am not interested in having freedoms within an authoritarian's parameters. I am only interested in self-determination.I have only respect for liberty as I am a libertarian."
38
"Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words."
37
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."
37
"Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart the gods are powerless against him."
36
"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness."
33
"Riches I hold in light esteem,And love I laugh to scorn,And lust of fame was but a dreamThat vanished with the morn.And if I pray, the only prayerThat moves my lips for meIs, 'Leave the heart that now I bear,And give me liberty!'Yes, as my swift days near their goal,'Tis all that I implore -In life and death, a chainless soul,With courage to endure."
31
"I am often reminded that the wellspring of Vermont liberty flows from Main Street, not State Street."
30
"The right to be a cussed fool Is safe from all devices human It's common (ez a gin'I rule) To every critter born of woman."
30
"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."
24
"The source of man's rights is not divine law or a congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A ___ and man is man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product for his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational."
23
"For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire."
23
"Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating."
23
"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."
22
"The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it."
22
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