Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Benjamin Franklin
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
Kahlil Gibran
You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can be free only if I am free.
Clarence Darrow
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
Thomas Jefferson
Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.
Hugo Grotius
When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
Oscar Wilde
The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.
Voltaire
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,… of searching and experimenting,… of saying no to any authority – literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political.
Ignazio Silone
All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws.
Voltaire
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson
The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.
Bertrand Barere
Liberty: One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.
Ambrose Bierce
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it…While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
Learned hand
Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.
Lord Acton
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
James Madison
I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
William Allen White
Liberty is the oxygen of the soul.
Moshe Dayan
If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.
Philip Wylie
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.
Benjamin Franklin
Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being free will.
John Acton
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
Liberty is nothing else but a chance to be better.
Albert Camus
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
Bible
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.
Robert Green Ingersoll
Liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is liberty to that which is good, just, and honest.
John Winthrop
Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Lord Acton
It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
Dick Cheney
There is no conflict between liberty and safety. We will have both or neither.
Ramsey Clark
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
Frederic Bastiat
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.
George Washington
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Georges Jacques Danton
Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it… The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Woodrow T. Wilson
No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
Anonymous
Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
Benjamin Franklin
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Henry B. Adams
Liberty’s in every blow! Let us do or die.
Robert Burns
The basis of a democratic state is liberty.
Aristotle
True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.
Jonathan Edwards
Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
Plato
The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.
Thomas Jefferson
Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil and, if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.
Aristotle
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.
Samuel Adams
Those who expect to reap the blessings of liberty must undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
Liberty is never free.
Anonymous
Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.
Jose Marti
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke
A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.
Joseph Addison
Liberty has restraints but no frontiers.
Lloyd George
Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
Thomas Jefferson
The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
Thomas Jefferson
Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos.
Bertrand Russell
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
It is not our frowning battlements…or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land….Our defence is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.
Abraham Lincoln
Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.
John Adams
Liberty is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
Nietzsche