Liberty Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Thomas Jefferson

John F. Kennedy

John Locke

Liberty Hyde Bailey

Ryszard Kapuściński

José Rizal

Lysander Spooner

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson

But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy

God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.

Throughout the day no time for memorandums now. Go ahead! Liberty and independence forever.

As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.

Otto Hermann Kahn

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.

Richard Lovelace

The rescue of a person, who is assaulted, or restrained of his liberty, without authority of law, is not only morally, but legally, a meritorious act; for every body is under obligation to go to the assistance of one who is assailed by assassins, robbers, ravishers, kidnappers, or ruffians of any kind.

Lysander Spooner

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

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.

We are as great as our belief in human liberty — no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

Archibald MacLeish

The liberty of the press is the palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

William Dean Howells

Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

Frédéric Bastiat

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Eugene McCarthy

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

What more felicity can fall to creature,
Than to enjoy delight with liberty.

Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.

Thomas Clarkson

Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.

Ryszard Kapuściński

It is true I am a Shawnee. My forefathers were warriors. Their son is a warrior. From them I take only my existence; from my tribe I take nothing. I am the maker of my own fortune; and oh! that I could make that of my red people, and of my country, as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the Spirit that rules the universe. I would not then come to Governor Harrison to ask him to tear the treaty and to obliterate the landmark; but I would say to him: "Sir, you have liberty to return to your own country."

Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.

Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.

Wendell Phillips