Quotes about liberty (2224 quotes, page 23)

“It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.”

Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) English abolitionist

An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, p. 54 (1788) https://books.google.com/books?id=pBOe7105MhMC&pg=PA54

Nature , Appearance , Men

“To me "where the wild things are" is a place that exists in our minds; it's a place of liberty and shamelessness. It can take a split second or a lifetime to find it, but once you do, you'll be free.”

Alessia Cara (1996) Canadian singer

"Wild Things" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De30ET0dQpQ, Know-It-All (2015), New York: Def Jam Recordings

“To me where the wild things are is a place that exists in our minds; it's a place of liberty and shamelessness. It can take a split second or a lifetime to find it, but once you do, you'll be free.”

Alessia Cara (1996) Canadian singer

"Wild Things" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De30ET0dQpQ, Know-It-All (2015), New York: Def Jam Recordings

“The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

People

“You constantly allege the declaration of human rights, the principles of liberty, and you yourselves believed in it so little that you constitutionally decreed slavery.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Attacking the defense of slavery, Session of National Constituent Assembly 13 May, 1791
Misc Quotes

“For all these things have been illegal, as illegal as the Revolution, as the fall of the Monarchy and of the Bastille, as illegal as liberty itself... Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution?”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Misc Quotes
Original: (fr) Citoyens, vouliez-vous une révolution sans révolution?

“For all these things have been illegal, as illegal as the Revolution, as the fall of the Monarchy and of the Bastille, as illegal as liberty itself”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Misc Quotes
Original: (fr) Citoyens, vouliez-vous une révolution sans révolution?

“Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to the man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it. But money can always and everywhere be spent, and, moreover, forbidden fruit is sweetest of all.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The House of the Dead https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=8PhfAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book-8PhfAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1 (1915), as translated by Constance Garnett, p. 16
General

Money , Time , Freedom

“Moral liberty and intellectual objectivity constitute a priori man’s deiformity.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2014, In the Face of the Absolute, World Wisdom, 9, 978-1-936597-41-3]
Human being, Deiformity

“Liberty is never safe.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Said to the Countess Russell and recorded in her diary, Lady John Russell: A Memoir (1910), edited by Desmond McCarthy and Agatha Russell. p. 252
1870s

“If we are free to be our varietal selves; if there be no obstructions to the exchange of ideas and goods; if we have the liberty to move; society and”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Idea

“A thousand creeds and battle-cries,
A thousand warring social schemes,
A thousand new moralities,
And twenty thousand thousand dreams!

Each on his own anarchic way,
From the old order breaking free, —
Our ruined world desires, you say,
License, once more, not Liberty.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Forward
The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems (1915)

War , World , Dreams , Way

“Georgia's character - now and forever - celebrates tolerance, embraces diversity, relishes lively and open debate, and above all, respects liberty and human dignity. Georgia is a democracy, because above all - its national identity is rooted in the traditions of democracy.”

Mikheil Saakashvili (1967) Georgian-Ukrainian politician, President of Georgia and Governor of Odessa

Remarks to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (2005)
Source: As quoted in "Remarks of the President of Georgia H.E. Mikheil Saakashvili to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe" https://reliefweb.int/report/georgia/remarks-president-georgia-he-mikheil-saakashvili-parliamentary-assembly-council (26 January 2005), ReliefWeb

Democracy

“Libraries ... will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them, cannot be enslaved. It is in the regions of ignorance that tyranny reigns.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Written by Henry Stuber as part of a biographical sketch of Franklin appended to a 1793 edition of Franklin's autobiography and sometimes reprinted with it in the 19th century. It is frequently misattributed to Franklin himself.
Misattributed

God , Men

“Nothing is more devastating than a life without liberty. A life in which one can be forced into parenthood is just such a life. Rape is among the most profound denials of liberty, and compelling a woman to bear a rapist's child is an assault on her humanity. How different is it to force her to remain pregnant... because efforts at birth control accidentally failed?”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

Source: Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1990), Approaching Abortion Anew

Birth , Life , Effort

“Religious faith and its practice cannot be taken for granted and we must be resolved in our defense of our cherished freedom to practice our faith, especially in the context of a secular culture which many times is opposed to its basic beliefs. History has witnessed many instances of blatant disregard for religious liberty which has resulted in devastating persecution.”

Gerald Barbarito (1950) Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida

Source: This 'Fortnight for Freedom' https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/52207/this-fortnight-for-freedom (28 June 2012)

History , Freedom , Faith , Time

“We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty.”

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) Martiniquais writer, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary

Source: Letter to Roger Tayeb, December 1961, as cited in Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), p. 185.

Justice , People

“May you remember, that the liberty which was acquired for you by your ancestors will be required of you by your descendants: then will you agree to a temperate and timely reform, reconcile the different classes of society, and prevent a convulsion which may involve all in one common ruin.”

John Russell, 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878) leading Whig and Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister on two occasions

1820s
Source: Speech to the House of Commons on Parliamentary reform, 25 April 1822

Time

“Taxation imposed in an exaggerate, unjust, or unlawful way violates citizens’ fundamental rights to liberty and private property, and amounts to persecution, which is another name for violence.”

Marco Respinti (1964)

Source: “Exaggerate Taxation is Robbery” https://bitterwinter.org/exaggerate-taxation-is-robbery/

Way

“Things like freedom and liberty and constitutional protection and unalienable rights that are beyond the scope of government. Those type of things are the only things that will help us deal with some of the division in our country.”

Jody Hice (1960) Georgia Republican Congressman

Congressman Jody Hice: Religious Liberty and Good Business are Benefits of Republican Majority https://merionwest.com/2018/03/29/congressman-jody-hice-religious-liberty-and-good-business-are-benefits-of-republican-majority/ (29 March 2018)

Freedom , Country , Help

“One of the paradoxes of history has been the way in which the name of England has come to be so closely associated with liberty on the one hand and tradition on the other hand.”

Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) British historian

Liberty in the Modern World (1952), p. 21

History , Way

“Justice for all means reproductive justice, gender justice, queer justice. Liberty for all means the all-inclusive freedoms that guarantee every person agency over their own body.”

Michelle Wu (1985) City Councilor in Boston, Massachusetts

24 June 2022 "Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says overturning Roe v. Wade will 'ruin lives'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrmQGDRoWCY

Justice , Freedom , Personality

“To the intellectual the struggle for freedom is more vital than the actuality of a free society. He would rather "work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it."”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Source: The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 12: "Concerning Individual Freedom". [In this passage "work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it" is a quotation of Lincoln Steffens from The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931), p. 635]

Freedom , Fight

“The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848

Quotes about liberty page 23

Quotes about liberty
page 23