The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Freedom requires effort if it is to be won and vigilance if it is to be maintained. People just don’t value freedom until it is taken away.

Challenging snow is one of my favorite kinds of skiing, and I like being able to switch techniques at liberty.

Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases.

In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.

There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.

How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous – if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled...

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.

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

There has never been upon the earth a generation of free men and women. It is not yet time to write a creed. Wait until the chains are broken—until dungeons are not regarded as temples. Wait until solemnity is not mistaken for wisdom—until mental cowardice ceases to be known as reverence. Wait until the living...

This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.

I don’t want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen — a society...

Chastity … has, even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear...

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.

Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.(1778 – 1830)

Forgiveness is the process of dropping off your emotional baggage.

…So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man’s inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

Rights mean you have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor….I, in a way, don’t like to use those terms: gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious rights. There’s only one type of right. It’s the right...

The idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can’t create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge...

You have to remember, rights don’t come in groups we shouldn’t have ‘gay rights’; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn’t have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.

Your Majesty, I took the liberty because I was so desirous of visiting alone with you for a few minutes before the rest of the other peasants arrived.

Freedom can be a state of mind, a path built independently, and with freedom comes responsibility.

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. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

Price controls almost invariably produce black markets, where prices are not only higher than the legally permitted prices, but also higher than they would be in a free market, since the legal risks must also be compensated. While small-scale black markets may function in secrecy, large-scale black markets usually require bribes to officials to look...

In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves...

The Pledge of Allegiance says ‘liberty and justice for all’. Which part of ‘all’ don’t you understand?

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

When everything has gone down, God wants youto look up

From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

Democracy is a suggestion box for slaves.

Almost all heroism is designed to make you inert by placing it in a context that you can’t possibly act on.

Lies don’t make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.

I’ve devoted my life to see equality for blacks, and at the same time, I’ve denied the needs of my family. Please understand that I take these actions, not out of selfishness or arrogance, but to preserve a South Africa worth living in for blacks and whites.

[T]he state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

Finally liberty has come!

Access to unlimited funds by a government, not surprisingly, leads to an unlimited government.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.

[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one’s personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept...