Liberty Quotes

"When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her."

"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither"

"Vanity made the [French] Revolution; liberty was only a pretext."

"Once we roared like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security! The solution for America's problem is not in terms of big government, but it is in big men over whom nobody stands in control but God."

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

"The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty."

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

"Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free."

"Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches."

"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty."

"Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found."

"It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty."

"How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment."

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."

"It behooves 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."

"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave."

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time."

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."