On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (1843)
Context: From the time of its discovery, the Spanish government pushed forward its settlements in America, not only with vigor, but with eagerness.... The robbery and destruction of the native race was the achievement of standing armies, in the right of the king, and by his authority, fighting in his name, for the aggrandizement of his power and the extension of his prerogatives, with military ideas under arbitrary maxims, — a portion of that dreadful instrumentality by which a perfect despotism governs a people. As there was no liberty in Spain, how could liberty be transmitted to Spanish colonies?
"On the Condition of Free Men of Colour" (31 May 1791)
Letter to James Warren (12 February 1779) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2094
Address to the United Nations Fourth Committee in New York
2015
“By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.”
Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 2, Protocols of Wealth, p. 33
“Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.”
1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)
Context: The Constitution and laws of our country are adopted and enacted through the direct action of the people, or through their duly chosen representatives. They reflect the enlightened conscience of our country. They ought always to speak with the true and conscientious voice of the people. Such voice has from time immemorial had the authority of divine sanction. In their great fundamentals they do not change. As new light arrives they may be altered in their details, but they represent the best that we know at any given time. To support the Constitution, to observe the laws, is to be true to our own higher nature. That is the path, and the only path, towards liberty. To resist them and violate them is to become enemies to ourselves and instruments of our own destruction. That is the path towards servitude. Obedience is not for the protection of someone else, but for the protection of ourselves. It needs to be remembered that it has to be secured not through the action of others, but through our own actions. Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.
Vol. I : The Dedication (March 1772)
Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–1774)
Context: Respect a parliamentary king, and chearfully pay all parliamentary taxes; but have nothing to do with a parliamentary religion, or a parliamentary God.
Religious rights, and religious liberty, are things of inestimable value. For these have many of our ancestors suffered and died; and shall we, in the sunshine of prosperity, desert that glorious cause, from which no storms of adversity or persecution could make them swerve? Let us consider if as a duty of the first rank with respect to moral obligation, to transmit to our posterity, and provide, as far as we can, for transmitting, unimpaired, to the latest generations, that generous zeal for religion and liberty, which makes the memory of our forefathers so truly illustrious.
“O Liberty, how many crimes are committed in thy name!”
On being led to her execution, sometimes stated to have been directed at a specific statue of Liberty, in Memoirs, Appendix; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), and in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922); used by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essay on Mirabeau.
Variants:
O liberté, comme on t'a jouée!
O Liberty, how thou hast been played with!
As quoted in Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France (1795) by Helen Maria Williams, Vol. 1, p. 201 http://books.google.de/books?id=FTkuAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA201
“How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence.”
We tried to overcome the thirty thousand majority by honest methods, which was a mathematical impossibility. After we had borne these indignities for eight years life became worthless under such conditions.
As quoted in "The Question of Race in the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895" (July 1952), by George B. Tindall. The Journal of Negro History, 37 (3): 277–303. JSTOR 2715494., p. 94.
Rep. Steve King: Protecting the Unborn Reaffirms Jefferson’s Truths http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/11/01/exclusive-rep-steve-king-protecting-the-unborn-reaffirms-jeffersons-truths/ (November 1, 2017)
