Motivational Quotes

Liberty

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal -- well-meaning but without understanding.

- Brandeis, Louis D.

Best Quotes about Liberty

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Thoreau, Henry David

What light is to the eyes -- what air is to the lungs -- what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

We are as great as our belief in human liberty -- no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

Macleish, Archibald

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

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

Farrar, Frederick

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Jefferson, Thomas

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

Breton, Andre

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

Burke, Edmund

Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.

Adams, John

10.

They who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Franklin, Benjamin

11.

Show me the country that has no strikes and I'll show you the country in which there is no liberty.

Gompers, Samuel

12.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.

Hegel, Georg

13.

Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.

Warren, Earl

14.

It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.

Weil, Simone

15.

It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.

Schumpeter, Joseph A.

16.

It is not one man nor a million, but the spirit of liberty that must be preserved. The waves which dash upon the shore are, one by one, broken, but the ocean conquers nevertheless. It overwhelms the Armada, it wears out the rock. In like manner, whatever the struggle of individuals, the great cause will gather strength.

Byron, Lord

17.

There can be no liberty that isn't earned.

Young, Robert R.

18.

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

Whitman, Walt

19.

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

20.

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

Curran, John Philpot

21.

The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.

Burke, Edmund

22.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Jefferson, Thomas

23.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

Then we are assured by Sartre that owing to the final disappearance of God our liberty is absolute! At this the entire audience waves its hat or claps its hands. But this natural enthusiasm is turned abruptly into something much less buoyant when it is learnt that this liberty weighs us down immediately with tremendous responsibilities. We now have to take all God's worries on our shoulders --now that we are become men like gods. It is at this point that the Anxiety and Despondency begin, ending in utter despair.

Lewis, Wyndham

25.

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

26.

An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.

Montessori, Maria

27.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Jefferson, Thomas

28.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

Wylie, Philip

29.

What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute. There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something. Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance. You could not liberate a stone if there were no law of gravity -- for where will the stone go, once it is quarried?

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

30.

Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.

Hailsham, Lord Quintin Hogg

31.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

Madison, James

32.

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Picabia, Francis

33.

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.

Kahn, Otto Herman

34.

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Rogers, Will

35.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Seneca

37.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal -- well-meaning but without understanding.

Brandeis, Louis D.

38.

I would rather not be a king than to forfeit my liberty.

Phaedrus

39.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

Mccarthy, Mary

40.

Liberty is God's gift, liberties the devil s.

Proverb, German

41.

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.

White, William Allen

42.

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

The history of liberty is the history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist the concentration of power we are resisting the powers of death. Concentration of power precedes the destruction of human liberties.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

44.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Adams, Henry Brooks

45.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Freud, Sigmund

46.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

Jefferson, Thomas

47.

Old England liberty -- to be robbed by the Ministry, and insulted by the populace without redress.

Stedman, Captain J. G.

48.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

Washington, George

49.

The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.

Hazlitt, William

50.

Once we roared like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security! The solution for America's problem is not in terms of big government, but it is in big men over whom nobody stands in control but God.

Peale, Norman Vincent