Famous Quotes About “Liberty”
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1791)
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-- Ronald Reagan (1986)
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
-- Albert Einstein (1950)
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
-- John Adams (1814)
One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
-- Thomas B. Reed (1886)
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1755)
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least."
-- Henry David Thoreau
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-- Attributed to George Washington
I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
-- Will Rogers
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-- H.L. Mencken
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
-- Mark Twain (1866)
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
-- William Allen White
The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients.
-- Edmund Burke (1899)
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.
-- Thomas Paine (1795)
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis (1928)
The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.
-- Justice George Sutherland (1938)
Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
-- Daniel Webster
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
-- Milton Friedman
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1877)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton (1887)
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
--Winston Churchill (1903)
From: The Libertarian Party