Freedom and Liberty Quotes
“Majority rule only works if you’re also considering individual rights. Because you can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.” Larry Flynt
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“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” James Madison
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“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)
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“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” George Orwell
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“A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.” Euripides
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“The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.” William O. Douglas
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“When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking.” John Wooden
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“Freedom is never an achieved state; like electricity, we’ve got to keep generating it or the lights go out.” Wayne LaPierre
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“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” Samuel Adams
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“The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power.” General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
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“If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.” George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950), British author
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“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” John Milton
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“Freedom… refer[s] to a social relationship among people—namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.” Thomas Sowell (1930- ), writer and economist
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“The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.” Louis D. Brandeis
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“We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear—unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called ‘the insolence of elected persons’—in a word, free men.” Gerald W. Johnson
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“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell (1903-1950), English novelist, essayist, and critic
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“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.” Mahatma Gandhi
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“No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.” Wendell Phillips
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“He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.” Samuel Adams
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“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” Thomas Paine