"Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role."
Liberty quotes
Liberty
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Liberty quotes (page 24 of 131)
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"The human race is in the best condition when it has the greatest degree of liberty."
"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
"All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world."
"Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency."
"It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal and cannot be attributed to the holding of opinions or to mere intent in the absence of overt acts."
"Liberty is the right to do what I like; licence, the right to do what you like."
"A tyranny based on ... deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself."
"When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity."
"What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion."
"Capitalism demands the best of every man - his rationality - and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him."
"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."
"I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty."
"I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, 'A free field and no favor.'"
"In what is necessary, unity; in what is not necessary, liberty and in all things charity."
"Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man."
"[A] free government . . . cannot be supported without Virtue."
"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."
"Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them."
"Religion is the mortar that binds society together; the granite pedestal of liberty; the strong backbone of the social system."