Motivational Quotes

Liberty

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

- Freud, Sigmund

Best Quotes about Liberty

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

Madison, James

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

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

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

Burke, Edmund

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

Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.

Hailsham, Lord Quintin Hogg

The approach of liberty makes even an old man brave.

Seneca

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

11.

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

Burke, Edmund

12.

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

13.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Brandeis, Louis D.

19.

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

Phaedrus

20.

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

Rogers, Will

21.

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

Breton, Andre

22.

Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.

Montesquieu, Charles De

23.

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

Freud, Sigmund

24.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

25.

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

Madison, James

26.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Seneca

27.

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

Adams, John

28.

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

Davis, Angela Y.

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

32.

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

Tillotson, John

33.

Liberty consists in wholesome restraint.

Webster, Daniel

34.

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

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

Montesquieu, Charles De

37.

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

38.

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Picabia, Francis

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

There can be no liberty that isn't earned.

Young, Robert R.

45.

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

White, William Allen

46.

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

Kahn, Otto Herman

47.

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

48.

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

Warren, Earl

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.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Goldwater, Barry