“Freedom isn’t free.” ——Author Unknown
“The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” ——H. L. Mencken
“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” ——Benjamin Franklin
“While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader…. If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.” ——John Adams
“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
“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ——George Orwell
“Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” ——Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there is no longer any first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race — until that day, the dreams of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.” ——Haile Selassie I
“Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.” ——John Adams
“Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.” ——Archibald MacLeish
“Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise.” ——Alexander Meiklejohn
“I know of no civilized country, indeed, in which liberty is less esteemed than it is in the United States: certainly there is none in which more persistent efforts are made to limit it and put it down.” ——Author Unknown
“Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate… Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.” ——H.L. Mencken
“If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?” ——Herbert Spencer
“There is no ‘slippery slope’ toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.” ——Alan K. Simpson
“In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.” ——Edward Gibbon
“Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.” ——Friedrich August von Hayek
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” ——Justice Louis D. Brandeis
“But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government.” ——Andrew Jackson
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” ——Wendell Phillips
“Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” ——Frederick Douglass
“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” ——John Philpot Curran
“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” ——Woodrow Wilson
“O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!” ——Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland
“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 understand the minds of other men and women.” ——Learned Hand
“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
“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
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” ——John Milton
“For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling instruments.” ——Noam Chomsky
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” ——Samuel Adams
“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.” ——Voltaire
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism’s ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power.” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” ——James Bovard
“Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.” ——Franklin P. Adams
“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” ——John Quincy Adams
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization… The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.” ——Felix Frankfurter
“Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.” ——Justice Robert H. Jackson
“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.” ——Samuel Adams
“The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.” ——Charles Eliot Norton
“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
“To change masters is not to be free.” ——Jose Marti y Perez
“What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“When the rights of just one individual are denied, the rights of all are in jeopardy!” ——Jo Ann Roach
“I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.” ——H.L. Mencken
“I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom, even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.” ——Kahlil Gibran