Liberty Quotes

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.
--George Washington

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
--Abraham Lincoln

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
--John Stuart Mill

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - 1749-1832

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
--Dorothy Thompson

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
-- Thomas Paine

What then is freedom?  The power to live as one wishes.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
--Thomas Jefferson

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
--Voltaire

That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest...
--Henry David Thoreau

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
--Edmund Burke

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on Earth... and what no just government should refuse.
--Thomas Jefferson in a Letter to Janes Madison, Paris, Dec. 20, 1787 

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
--Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816

Man is not free unless government is limited.
--Ronald Regan: Farewell Speech, 1988

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and lost it, have never known it again.
--Ronald Reagan 

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
--Tacitus, Roman senator and historian (A.D. c.56-c.115)

Liberty and freedom are the conditions of man within a contractual society.
Ludwig Von Mises

The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
--Plato 

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to always be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.
--Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826 

Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.
--Michael Rivero 

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
--Abraham Lincoln 
 

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
--Edward Gibbon