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Quotation of the day
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Daily Quote:
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests" (Vidal, Gore - Language)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Liberty

A day, an hour of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.
A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.
A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.
An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.
Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
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.
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.
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 am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
I would rather not be a king than to forfeit my liberty.
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.
If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.
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.
It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you.
It is not one man nor a million, but the spirit of liberty that must be preserved. The waves which dash upon the shore are, one by one, broken, but the ocean conquers nevertheless. It overwhelms the Armada, it wears out the rock. In like manner, whatever the struggle of individuals, the great cause will gather strength.
It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.
Liberty consists in wholesome restraint.
Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Liberty has no crueler enemy than license.
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Liberty is God's gift, liberties the devil s.
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.
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.
Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.
License they mean when they cry liberty.
No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.
Old England liberty -- to be robbed by the Ministry, and insulted by the populace without redress.
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.
One's liberty should end when it becomes the curse of his neighbor.
Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
Peace is liberty in tranquillity.
Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.
Show me the country that has no strikes and I'll show you the country in which there is no liberty.
The approach of liberty makes even an old man brave.
The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.
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.
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.
The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal -- well-meaning but without understanding.
The history of liberty is the history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist the concentration of power we are resisting the powers of death. Concentration of power precedes the destruction of human liberties.
The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
The more liberty you give away the more you will have.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.
Then we are assured by Sartre that owing to the final disappearance of God our liberty is absolute! At this the entire audience waves its hat or claps its hands. But this natural enthusiasm is turned abruptly into something much less buoyant when it is learnt that this liberty weighs us down immediately with tremendous responsibilities. We now have to take all God's worries on our shoulders --now that we are become men like gods. It is at this point that the Anxiety and Despondency begin, ending in utter despair.
There can be no liberty that isn't earned.
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
They who are in the highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are the most observed.
They who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
We are as great as our belief in human liberty -- no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.