There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
~ John Adams
It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.
~ Samuel Adams
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 tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.
~ Bertrand Berere
Liberty: One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.
~ Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary
The difference between Liberty and liberties is as great as between God and gods.
~ Ludwig Boerne
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
~ Louis D. Brandeis
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
~ Edmund Burke
It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
~ Dick Cheney
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
A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.
~ Baron de Montesquieu
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
~ Benjamin Franklin,
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased a the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
~ Patrick Henry
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
~ Thomas Jefferson
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least.
~ Wendy Kaminer
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
~ John F. Kennedy
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
~ D.H. Lawrence, in Classical American Literature
We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.
~ Robert J. McCracken
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
~ H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. 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
Nations grown corrupt
Love bondage more than liberty;
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
~John Milton
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
~ Thomas Paine
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
~ Wendell Phillips
Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
~ Will Rogers
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.
~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.
~ Theodore Roosevelt
When the People contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything for their Victory but new Masters.
~ George Savile
When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
~ Dorothy Thompson
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
~ Dorothy Thompson
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
~ Daniel Webster
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
~ Simone Weil
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
~ Woodrow Wilson
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.
~ John P. Zenger
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