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Liberty Quotes
"Is liberty your compass needle? Do you live by it? Do you seek it out equally for yourself as for others? Is it your creed? Do you observe its tenets and principles? Are you truly free?"
40
"Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa."
39
"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."
39
"The sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called Liberty."
39
"If we really want liberty - if we really want liberty - then we need to go out and get it, we need to take it, because nobody is going to give it to us. And we need to do it now."
38
"Our common liberty is consecrated by a common sorrow."
37
"In every man there is an instinctive and passionate reaction if his person or liberty is attacked."
37
"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."
36
"The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion."
36
"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?"
36
"To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties."
35
"Liberals are stalwart defenders of civil liberties - provided we're only talking about criminals."
34
"It is terrible to speak of you, Liberty, for one who lives without you."
34
"One man's fight is another man's freedom."
34
"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."
34
"This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it."
33
"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."
33
"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."
33
"Freedomis a property of all rational beings."
33
"There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself."
33
"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."
31
"A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself."
30
"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."
30
"Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart the gods are powerless against him."
30
"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."
29
"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness."
27
"The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny."
27
"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?"
26
"I am often reminded that the wellspring of Vermont liberty flows from Main Street, not State Street."
25
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."
25
"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."
23
"Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words."
23
"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."
21
"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."
19
"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."
18
"I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."
17
"With every drop of my blood I hate and execrate every form of tyranny, every form of slavery. I hate dictation. I love liberty."
17
"For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire."
16
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
16
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