Liberty Quotes

“When I was a young man, I had liberty, but I did not see it. I had time, but I did not know it. And I had love, but I did not feel it. Many decades would pass before I understood the meaning of all three. Now, in the twilight of my life, misunderstanding has passed into contentment. Love, liberty, and time, once so disposable, are the fuels that drive me forward.”
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Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death

Puerto Rico will be the first half-and-half banana republic state incorporated that will secede from the union. Then will come Liberty Island, then Mississippi Burning, Texas BBQ, Kentucky Fried Chicken—all of them—New York Yankees, Jersey Devils—you name it—will want to break apart—and demand a separation—a divorce. Things will not go well for the banana republic when the shackles and chains of democracy break loose and unleash the dogs of war.

The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.

Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you.

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

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.

Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding.

The soul of the journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

Those who would sacrifice essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.

Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed.

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

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

Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free.

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.