Quotes about Liberty

Why do these civilizations all seem to follow the same identifiable sequence—from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, and finally from dependence back into bondage?

When I was a boy, the priest, my uncle, carefully inculcated upon me this proverb, which I then learned and have ever since kept in my mind: 'Dico tibi verum, Libertas optima rerum; Nunquam servili, sub nexu vivito, fili.' 'I tell you a truth: Liberty is the best of things, my son; never live under any slavish bond.'

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.

[Liberty] is freedom of choice, a divine gift, an essential virtue in a peaceful society.

When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom.

Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.

Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

It is human variability -- the fact that one man's meat is is another man's poison -- that imposes on us the duty of preserving individual liberty and of encouraging tolerance, of preventing majorities from repressing minorities, of permitting people to have a certain measure of self-determination in their lives.

But I don't want comfort; I want god, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Political liberty's a swindle because a man doesn't spend his time being political. He spends it sleeping, eating, amusing himself a little and working?—mostly working. When they'd got all the political liberty they wanted?—or found they didn't want?—they began to understand this.

How can there ever be liberty under any system? No amount of profit-sharing or self-government by the workers, no amount of hyjeenic conditions or cocoa villages or recreation grounds can get rid of the fundamental slavery?—the necessity of working. Liberty? why, it doesn't exist! There's no liberty in this world; only gilded caiges.