Motivational Quotes

Liberty

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

- Burke, Edmund

Best Quotes about Liberty

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

Bakunin, Mikhail

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

Burke, Edmund

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

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

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

10.

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

Breton, Andre

11.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Jefferson, Thomas

12.

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

Madison, James

13.

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.

14.

Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.

Hailsham, Lord Quintin Hogg

15.

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

16.

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

Kahn, Otto Herman

17.

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

Brandeis, Louis D.

18.

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

19.

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

Freud, Sigmund

20.

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

White, William Allen

21.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

22.

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

Phaedrus

23.

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

Davis, Angela Y.

24.

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

25.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

26.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

27.

There can be no liberty that isn't earned.

Young, Robert R.

28.

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

29.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

Montesquieu, Charles De

30.

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

Adams, John

31.

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

Proverb, German

32.

The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.

Asquith, Margot

33.

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Picabia, Francis

34.

Liberty has no crueler enemy than license.

Proverb, French

35.

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Santayana, George

36.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

37.

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

Rogers, Will

38.

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

39.

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

40.

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.

Blake, William

41.

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.

42.

Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.

Montesquieu, Charles De

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.

Ruskin, John

46.

What a pity we don't pursue the salvation of humans with the same verve we pursue the salvation of animals

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Gompers, Samuel

50.

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

Farrar, Frederick