Thomas Jefferson. . . knew what schools were for–to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. . . It would not have come easily to the mind of such a...

Without “the people,” there is no country.

United States: the country where liberty is a statue.

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.

The responsibility of the present generation is to prepare for the future. Show the youth the truth, make them think, guide them, and let them follow their chosen path.Your duty is done after you made...

What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business–not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any...

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness… but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable.

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

What light is to the eyes — what air is to the lungs — what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.

Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition...

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except...

Freedom or prison–what’s the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies where everyone was not free – where, in fact, the vast...

… how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!

If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country...

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we...

It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of...

There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and...

When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.

Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you?Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free.

Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

It is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and...

Growing economies are built by billions of actors behaving according to their own interests, coordinated through institutions that no one in particular created.Realizing this requires humility, a trait that is in short supply among would-be...

The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s all. It doesn’t guarantee our rights to charity.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

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

The tyrant has power to play as long as he is the master in his surroundings.

It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States…capable of maintaining the rule of democracy…. Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores…. I am convinced that...

I have been lately introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He is vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part I forgive him....

A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who’s not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he’s a criminal, in a green costume he’s a hero who gets a parade and a...

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

Without Freedom or Liberty, creativity can not exist.

In seeking an empire of liberty, Jefferson wished not only to expand the country’s territorial holdings, but also to extend American institutions around the globe.

. . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than...

There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement...

When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . ....

Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered.

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

Kidnap me and take me away. Throw me across the back of your bike and show me what it feels like to have the wind in your face and the sun on your skin, day...

I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done ‘for the Fatherland’.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay...

I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed…

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my...

For all the enlightened nations that profess a loyalty to liberty, democracy, economy and all the rest, there has long been a readiness to look for a chosen one; as Carlyle pointed out, even the...

LIBERTY, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

To renounce freedom is to renounce one’s humanity, one’s rights as a man and equally one’s duties.

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world...

What are you thinking?” he asks.I know Gage hates it when I cry – he is completely undone by the sight of tears – so I blink hard against the sting. “I’m thinking how thankful...

Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing...