Famous Quotes & Sayings

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Excessive liberty leads both nations and individuals into excessive slavery. [Lat., Nimia libertas et populis et privatis in nimiam servitutem cadit.]

Margaret Thatcher

If someone is confronting our essential liberties, if someone is inflicting injuries and harm, by God I'll confront them!

Margaret Thatcher

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

L. Neil Smith

Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moments respite deserve only the end of a rope.

P. J. O'Rourke

There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions.

P. J. O'Rourke

When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.

P. J. O'Rourke

Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's "fair share" of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.

Paul Singer

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.

Oscar Wilde

Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.

Oscar Wilde

Liberty is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper.

Lyman Beecher

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.

Louis L'Amour

Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

Mark Twain

We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.

Mark Twain

Our lives, our liberty, and our property are never in greater danger than when Congress is in session.

Marquis de Lafayette

In the American colonies, the main problem of liberty has been solved, demonstrated and practiced in such a manner as not to leave much to be said by European institutions.

Mary McCarthy

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Mary Wortley Montagu

I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.

Michael Sandel

[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.

Mark Twain

Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not know what a palladium is, but I am sure it is a good thing!

Frank Murphy

Liberty is too priceless to be forfeited through the zeal of an administrative agent.

Christopher Gadsden

My sentiments for the American cause, from the Stamp Act downward, have never changed... I am still of opinion that it is the cause of liberty and of human nature.

Chris Rock

You don't pay taxes; they take them from your check. That's not a payment - that's a 'jack.

George Washington

Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?

George Washington

[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists . . . an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.

George Washington

What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious.

George Washington

Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Money is coined liberty.

John Quincy Adams

Individual liberty is individual power.

John Owen

Only what God has commanded in His word should be regarded as binding; in all else there may be liberty of actions.

John Milton

Nations grow corrupt, love bondage more than liberty; bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.

Norm MacDonald

Liberty, like health, appears most precious when lost.

Nolan Bushnell

Can liberty be destroyed by the truth?

Thomas Jefferson

I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude