Liberty Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Thomas Jefferson

John F. Kennedy

John Locke

Henry Adams

Fisher Ames

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Mikhail Bakunin

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

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.

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

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

Barry Goldwater

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

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

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."

Now one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle!

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich Hayek

We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive. … The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of 'conservation education'.

Nothing is more precious than Independence and Liberty.

The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.... Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.... As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

Anthony Kennedy

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

This is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.

William Jennings Bryan

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

Only in democratic countries is there the beginning of a suspicion that the old axioms about the press being the bulwark of liberty is something that affects the daily life of the people—that it is a living warning rather than an ancient wisecrack. A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it but the free-thinker alone is truly free.

George Berkeley

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.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.

Otto Hermann Kahn

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