Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Ray

Lean liberty is better than fat slavery

James H. Douglas

I am often reminded that the wellspring of Vermont liberty flows from Main Street, not State Street.

Friedrich August von Hayek

At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change.

Friedrich August von Hayek

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.

Friedrich August von Hayek

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.

Friedrich August von Hayek

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

Friedrich August von Hayek

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

Henry A. Kissinger

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

Henry Hazlitt

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

Henry Hazlitt

Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.

Malcolm X

It'll be the ballot or the bullet. It'll be liberty or it'll be death

Malcolm X

It's liberty or death! It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody!

Malcolm X

Anytime anyone is enslaved, or in any way deprived of his liberty, if that person is a human being, as far as I am concerned he is justified to resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again.

Mahatma Gandhi

No power on earth can resist the lovers of liberty who are ready not to kill opponents, but be killed by them.

Mahatma Gandhi

Liberty never meant the license to do anything at will.

Mahatma Gandhi

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

Mahatma Gandhi

Under democracy, individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded.

Mahatma Gandhi

We dare not enter the kingdom of liberty with mere life-homage to truth and nonviolence.

John Adams

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.

John Adams

Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.

John Adams

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.

John Adams

[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.

John Adams

Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.

John Adams

Those who trade liberty for security have neither.

Jacob Bronowski

Dissent is the mark of freedom.

Jacob Bronowski

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Hartley Coleridge

But what is Freedom? Rightly understood, A universal licence to be good.

Eric Hoffer

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

Eric Hoffer

There can be no freedom without freedom to fail.

Eric Hoffer

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We are going to tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.

Lord Acton

The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.

Orson Scott Card

Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.