liberty

1.

America will never run... And we will always be grateful that liberty has found such brave defenders.

- George W. Bush

2.

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

- Howells, William Dean

3.

The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race.

- Mazzini, Giuseppe

4.

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.

- Mailer, Norman

5.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

- Lincoln, Abraham

6.

All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.

- Shelley, Percy Bysshe

7.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

- Wylie, Philip

8.

True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all.

- Mansfield, Lord

9.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

- Shaw, George Bernard

10.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

- John Adams

11.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

- Madison, James

12.

I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

- Patrick Henry

13.

We are all of us the worse for too much liberty.

- Terence

14.

Those that marry for money sell their liberty.

- Proverb

15.

They who are in the highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are the most observed.

- Tillotson, John

16.

LOOKING-GLASS, n. A vitreous plane upon which to display a fleeting show for man's disillusion given. The King of Manchuria had a magic looking-glass, whereon whoso looked saw, not his own image, but only that of the king. A certain courtier who had long enjoyed the king's favor and was thereby enriched beyond any other subject of the realm, said to the king: "Give me, I pray, thy wonderful mirror, so that when absent out of thine august presence I may yet do homage before thy visible shadow, prostrating myself night and morning in the glory of thy benign countenance, as which nothing has so divine splendor, O Noonday Sun of the Universe!" Please with the speech, the king commanded that the mirror be conveyed to the courtier's palace; but after, having gone thither without apprisal, he found it in an apartment where was naught but idle lumber. And the mirror was dimmed with dust and overlaced with cobwebs. This so angered him that he fisted it hard, shattering the glass, and was sorely hurt. Enraged all the more by this mischance, he commanded that the ungrateful courtier be thrown into prison, and that the glass be repaired and taken back to his own palace; and this was done. But when the king looked again on the mirror he saw not his image as before, but only the figure of a crowned ass, having a bloody bandage on one of its hinder hooves -- as the artificers and all who had looked upon it had before discerned but feared to report. Taught wisdom and charity, the king restored his courtier to liberty, had the mirror set into the back of the throne and reigned many years with justice and humility; and one day when he fell asleep in death while on the throne, the whole court saw in the mirror the luminous figure of an angel, which remains to this day.

- Ambrose Bierce

17.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

- Russell, Bertrand

18.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

- George Orwell

19.

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.

- Burke, Edmund

20.

One's liberty should end when it becomes the curse of his neighbor.

- Farrar, Frederick