Liberty Quotes - Page 2

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

If you spend time with crazy and dangerous people, remember – their personalities are socially transmitted diseases; like water poured into a container, most of us eventually turn into – or remain – whoever we surround ourselves with. We can choose our tribe, but we cannot change that our tribe is our destiny.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

I realized that conservatism was the philosophy that best suited me, with its emphasis on individual liberty, personal responsibility, and merit.

The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.

Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.

I am happy that I can aid those admirable men, both living and dead, who by their pens or their tongues have aided the great cause of human liberty and universal happiness.

No teacher has the right to cure a child of making noises on a drum. The only curing that should be practiced is the curing of unhappiness.

Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd you see in your life today are just as unecessary as when you were alone.

Give me liberty or give me death."

[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]

Why should I fear death?
If I am, then death is not.
If Death is, then I am not.
Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?
Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.
Religious tyranny did domineer.
At length the mighty one of Greece
Began to assent the liberty of man.

The adjacent shores resounded with the alternate shouts of the sons of liberty and the groans of their parting spirits.

Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.

...for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

No man [...] can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.

There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, this thinking goes. Economics is a matter of acquiring and allocating, not creating. This was the view of the world’s smartest people, all top philosophers and not stupid people, for many thousands of years before the age of the enlightenment. It still is.

Vengeance against predators is meals on wheels.

Books make it possible for every person born into the world to begin where the previous generation left off.