“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” ——Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.” ——D. H. Lawrence
“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” ——Edward R. Murrow
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” ——James Madison
“The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.” ——Woodrow Wilson
“The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.” ——Adlai E. Stevenson
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue.” ——George Mason
“If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.” ——Robert Frost
“Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.” ——Jean Jacques Rousseau
“Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.” ——Mary McCarthy
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” ——John Milton
“As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.” ——Otto Hermann Kahn
“I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.” ——H. L. Mencken
“It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ——Benjamin Franklin
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” ——George Bernard Shaw
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” ——Edmund Burke
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” ——Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.” ——Marcus Tullius Cicero
“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
“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” ——William Hazlitt
“Where liberty is, there is my country.” ——Benjamin Franklin
“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
“The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.” ——William O. Douglas
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” ——George Orwell
“A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.” ——Euripides
“The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.” ——William O. Douglas
“When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking.” ——John Wooden
“Freedom is never an achieved state; like electricity, we’ve got to keep generating it or the lights go out.” ——Wayne LaPierre
“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
“The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power.” ——General Douglas MacArthur
“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
“Freedom… refers 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
“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
“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.” ——Mahatma Gandhi
“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
“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
“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