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Quotes about liberty

136 quotes from 75 people

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If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?
Samuel Adams1722–1803Instructions to Boston’s Representatives (May 1764), also quoted in Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (1997), by William M. Fowler Jr., p. 51
- Government
All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Mens Understandings.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury1671–1713Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Vol. 1, pp. 39-40; “Sensus Communis”.
- Debate
Please use your liberty to promote ours.
Aung San Suu Kyiborn 1945Please Use Your Liberty to Promote Ours (1997)
- Freedom
Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.
Aeschylus525–456 BCAgamemnon, line 1364–1365
- Life & Death
We can afford no liberties with liberty itself.
Robert H. Jackson1892–1954United States v. Spector, 343 US 169, 180 (1952) (dissenting)
The suppression of liberty is always likely to be irrational.
John Rawls1921–2002A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter IV, Section 33, p. 210
I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Jean-Paul Sartre1905–1980Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), p. 52
Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.
Calvin Coolidge1872–1933Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)
So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you.
B. R. Ambedkar1891–1956Speech delivered to the Bombay Presidency Mahar Conference (31 May 1936)
- Freedom
We have depended on government for so much for so long that we as people have become less vigilant of our liberties.
Ron Paulborn 1935Speech in the House of Representatives, September 17, 1997
- Government
Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils.
Jeremy Bentham1748–1832Principles of Legislation (1830), Ch. X: Analysis of Political Good and Evil; How they are spread in society
- Government
- Laws
Men fight for liberty, and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D. H. Lawrence1885–1930“Liberty’s Old Old Story”, Pansies (1929)
The conflict between the principle of liberty and the fact of slavery is coming gradually to an issue. Slavery has now the power, and falls into convulsions at the approach of freedom.
John Quincy Adams1767–1848Journal of John Quincy Adams (11 December 1838)
- Slavery
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.
Henrik Ibsen1828–1906Letter to Georg Brandes (17 February 1871), as translated in Henrik Ibsen: Björnstjerne Björnson. Critical Studies (1899) by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes
Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.
Will Durant1885–1981Declaration of INTERdependence (1945)