A Quote by Henry Adams

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Henry Adams

Quote Topics

Absence Absolute Free Himself Ideally Individual Liberty Responsibility Responsible Restraint Therefore

Quote Author

Henry Adams
American - Historian
February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels 'free', but the objectionable control of force.

B. F. Skinner

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.

Daniel Webster

I developed the concept of the Happy Warrior as a rallying cry for those of us who want to restore America to its great foundational principles: individual freedom, personal responsibility, fiscal restraint, and economic liberty.

Monica Crowley

Restraint never ruins one's health. What ruins it,is not restraint but outward suppression. A really self-restrained person grows every day from strength to strength and from peace to more peace. The very first step in self-restraint is the restraint of thoughts.

Mahatma Gandhi

Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others

John Locke

The Tea Party, which is pretty darn clear on its main focus, which is fiscal restraint, financial restraint, economic restraint, and return to Constitutional values and Founding Fathers' principles, had been impugned as racist, violent, homophobic, and all their motivations have been impugned.

Andrew Breitbart

I like restraint. Even with actors, restraint is something that I work on the most.

John Hillcoat

Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

Wendell Berry

To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.

Eric Hoffer

Self-restraint may be alien to the human temperament, but humanity without restraint will dig its own grave.

Marya Mannes

Will, therefore, is the unbroken determination to exercise free choice as well as self-restraint, in spite of the unavoidable experience of shame and doubt in infancy.

Erik Erikson

I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.

Anton Chekhov

The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

Will Durant

Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.