Motivational Quotes

Liberty

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

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Liberty

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

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

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.

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

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Jefferson, Thomas

Liberty has no crueler enemy than license.

Proverb, French

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

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

Jefferson, Thomas

There can be no liberty that isn't earned.

Young, Robert R.

10.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

11.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

12.

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

Farrar, Frederick

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Freud, Sigmund

16.

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

17.

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

Proverb, German

18.

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

Breton, Andre

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

25.

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Picabia, Francis

26.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

Montesquieu, Charles De

27.

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

Rogers, Will

28.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

29.

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

Madison, James

30.

The approach of liberty makes even an old man brave.

Seneca

31.

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.

32.

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

Burke, Edmund

33.

Liberty consists in wholesome restraint.

Webster, Daniel

34.

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

Kahn, Otto Herman

35.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

Wylie, Philip

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Davis, Angela Y.

39.

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

Tillotson, John

40.

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

Brandeis, Louis D.

41.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

White, William Allen

45.

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

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

Warren, Earl

48.

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

Phaedrus

49.

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

50.

Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.

Montesquieu, Charles De