Liberty Quotes

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Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author

Thomas Jefferson

Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?

The destiny of America was proclaimed in words of prophecy spoken by our first President in his first inaugural in 1789 — words almost directed, it would seem, to this year of 1941: "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered … deeply,... finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable

Miguel de Cervantes

As apt and applicable as the Declaration of Independence is today, we would do well to honor that other historic document drafted in this hall—the Constitution of the United States. For it stressed not independence but interdependence—not the individual liberty of one but the indivisible liberty of all.

John F. Kennedy

He goes seeking liberty, which is so dear, as he knows who for it renounces life.

Dante Alighieri

The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Maximilien Robespierre

Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Thomas Jefferson

Prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty. Because there are aspirations that human beings share — the liberty of knowing that your leader is accountable to you, and that you won't be locked up for disagreeing with them; the opportunity to get an education and to be able to work with dignity; the freedom to practice your faith without fear or restriction. Those are universal values that must be observed everywhere.

Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.

Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge.

We do, then, most solemnly before God and the world declare that regardless of every consequence, at the risk of every distress, the arms we have been compelled to assume we will use with perseverance, exerting to their utmost energies all those powers which our Creator hath given us to preserve that liberty which he committed to us in sacred deposit and to protect from every hostile hand our lives and our properties.

Thomas Jefferson

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

Abraham Lincoln

To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.

Thomas Jefferson

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty.

Having defended the standard of liberty in this new world, having taught a lesson useful to those who inflict and to those who feel oppression you retire from the great theatre of action with the blessings of your fellow citizens.

Thomas Jefferson

I would have thee gone;
And yet no further than a wanton's bird,
Who lets it hop a little from her hand,
Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,
And with a silk thread plucks it back again,
So loving-jealous of his liberty.

William Shakespeare

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical;... even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern....

Thomas Jefferson

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that anybody may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: 'This is my country!

Benjamin Franklin

[Why is suicide held not to be right?] There is a doctrine uttered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door to his prison and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not understand. Yet I too, believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs.... And if one of your possessions, an ox or an ass, for example took the liberty of putting himself out of the way when you had given no intimation of your wish that he should die, would you not be angry with him, and would you not punish him if you could?... Then there may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him, as he is now summoning me.

It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.

Thomas Jefferson

Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but, if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her.

Abraham Lincoln

Ours is a government of liberty by, through, and under the law.
A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.

Theodore Roosevelt

Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.

Bertrand Russell