“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
No. 11 (June 24, 1758)
The Idler (1758–1760)
Address at the National Archives dedicating a shrine for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (15 December 1952) https://trumanlibrary.org/calendar/viewpapers.php?pid=2102
Context: Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty. The external threat to liberty should not drive us into suppressing liberty at home. Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
All freedom-loving nations, not the United States alone, are facing a stern challenge from the Communist tyranny. In the circumstances, alarm is justified. The man who isn't alarmed simply doesn't understand the situation — or he is crazy. But alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve.
Invasion and conquest by Communist armies would be a horror beyond our capacity to imagine. But invasion and conquest by Communist ideas of right and wrong would be just as bad.
For us to embrace the methods and morals of communism in order to defeat Communist aggression would be a moral disaster worse than any physical catastrophe. If that should come to pass, then the Constitution and the Declaration would be utterly dead and what we are doing today would be the gloomiest burial in the history of the world.
“Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.”
As quoted in Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn : Who Settled the State of Pennsylvania, and Founded the City of Philadelphia (1827) by S. C. Stevens, p. 117
“There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.”
The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)
Context: There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.
The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly and painfully advanced.
“I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.”
"Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism" http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of-state.htm, presented by Bakunin as a Reasoned Proposal to the Central Committee of the League for Peace and Freedom, at the League's first congress held in Geneva (September 1867).
Variant translation: We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.
As quoted in The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (1953) edited by Grigoriĭ Petrovich Maksimov, p. 269
1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
Remarks of President Barack Obama To the People of Israel at Jerusalem International Convention Center in Jerusalem, Israel (21 March 2013) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/03/21/remarks-president-barack-obama-people-israel
2013
