Liberty Quotes
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“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? ”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“to be a government of "liberty regulated by law," with such results in the development of strength, in population, wealth, and military and commercial power, as no age had ever witnessed.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
Quote by -Will Durant
But now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
Quote by -Will Durant
England has been called, with great felicity of conception, 'the land of liberty and good sense.' We have preserved many of the advantages of a free people, which the nations of the Continent have long since lost.
Quote by -William Godwin
Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.
Quote by -William Gerald Golding
Not everyone is willing to embrace liberty; liberty requires not just effort, but risk. Some people choose to delude themselves and see their chains as protective armor.
Quote by -Terry Goodkind
The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.
Quote by -Thomas Hobbes
Liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion
Quote by -Thomas Hobbes
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
Quote by -Thomas Merton
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Quote by -Soren Kierkegaard
To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.
Quote by -Susan B. Anthony
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
Quote by -H. L. Mencken
It isn't generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn't generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it's in the nature of hierarchy.
Quote by -Jordan Peterson
Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.
Quote by -John Adams
The dons, the bashaws, the grandees, the patricians, the sachems, the nabobs, call them by what names you please, sigh and groan and fret, and sometimes stamp and foam and curse, but all in vain. The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.
Quote by -John Adams
Have you ever found in history, one single example of a nation, thoroughly corrupted, that was afterwards restored to virtue? And without virtue there can be no political liberty.
Quote by -John Adams
Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. But if unlimited or unbalanced power of disposing property, be put into the hands of those who have no property, France will find, as we have found, the lamb committed to the custody of the world. In such a case, all the pathetic exhortations and addresses of the national assembly to the people, to respect property, will be regarded no more than the warbles of the songsters of the forest.
Quote by -John Adams
We may... affirm that the balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.
Quote by -John Adams
Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors.
Quote by -John Adams
Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.
Quote by -John Adams
We must not then depend alone upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for its preservation.
Quote by -John Adams
Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.
Quote by -John Adams
[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.
Quote by -John Adams
Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.
Quote by -John Adams
The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.
Quote by -John Adams
Let the pulpit resound with the doctrine and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear of the dignity of man's nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God . . . . Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes and parliaments.
Quote by -John Adams
If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude in all acts of government.
Quote by -John Adams
I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory.
Quote by -John Adams
I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.
Quote by -John Adams
Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.
Quote by -John Adams