Liberty quotes
2.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside liberty — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious."
"[V]irtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government."
"Interwoven is the love of liberty with every ligament of the heart."
"Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love."
"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."
"If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects."
"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?"
"... and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty."
"If you feel driven to feed the poor, get your checkbook out and keep your tyrannical mouth shut about it."
"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead."
"you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?"
"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans."
"I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory."
"We must not then depend alone upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for its preservation."
"We may... affirm that the balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates."
"Our nation is founded on the principal that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny."
"If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself."
"And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities."
"My main object in making a motion picture is entertainment. If at the same time I can strike a blow for liberty, then I'll stick one in."
"We built [socialistic society] for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks."
