Freedom and Liberty Quotes
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
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“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.” D. H. Lawrence (1885-1938)
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“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965), American Broadcast Newsman
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“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” James Madison
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“The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.” Woodrow Wilson, in a speech in New York City, September 9, 1912
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“The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.” Adlai E. Stevenson
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“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Thomas Jefferson
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“No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue.” George Mason (1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
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“If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.” Robert Frost
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“What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.” Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President Source: in a letter to William S. Smith, 13 November 1787
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“Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.” Jean Jacques Rousseau
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“Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.” Mary McCarthy
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“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” John Milton
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“As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.” Otto Hermann Kahn
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“I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.” H. L. Mencken
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“It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.” Thomas Jefferson
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“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin
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“Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” John Adams
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“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” George Bernard Shaw
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“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
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