Freedom and Liberty Quotes

 

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Thomas Jefferson
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“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Political philosopher, educationist and essayist, The Social Contract
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“Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.” Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Roman statesman, philosopher and orator
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“No man survives when freedom fails, the best men rot in filthy jails, And those who cry ‘appease, appease’ Are hanged by those they tried to please.” Hiram Mann
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“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
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“Where liberty is, there is my country.” Benjamin Franklin
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“The history of liberty is a history of the limitations of governmental power not the increase of it.” Woodrow Wilson
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“Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.” George Washington
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“The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.” William O. Douglas (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice, An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
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“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.” Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989), activist
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“The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men.” Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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“Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.” William Godwin (1756-1836)
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“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women.” Learned Hand
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“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Thomas Paine
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“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.” Frederick Douglass
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“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 a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface, and say, This is my country.” Benjamin Franklin to David Hartley, 4 December 1789
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“They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” Eugene Victor Debs
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“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” Patrick Henry
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“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Thomas Paine
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“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” Ayn Rand

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