Top 1200 Individual Liberty Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that "liberty inheres in some sensible object," are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable "liberty" at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise.

Liberalism, communism, socialism are about denying individual liberty and creating a collective with a top down command-and-control government and economy. Conservatives are individuals and not activists at all, and so there is no such strategy to bend, shape, and form a country.

If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.

And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.

The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury. One of the first duties of government is to afford that protection.

If to break loose from the bounds of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worst, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already.

People truly reaching across boundaries - be they religious or race, political or geographic. A state that is sincerely civil and respectful of each individual's pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be our goal.

The primary problem in many modernizing societies is not liberty but the creation of a legitimate public order. Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order.

The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.

I'm a committed Republican. I believe very strongly in individual liberty. I tend not to think much in terms of group politics. I really am a kind of small government person and I'm most certainly a fiscal conservative and strong on national defense.

Where was the libertarian right during the great struggles for individual liberty in America in the last half-century? The libertarian movement has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns for civil rights for nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians.

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes - whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought.

America will nurture a new Muslim - one who can believe in Muhammad and the Quran but who abandons belief in a Shariah-based state and affirms the primary American value of individual liberty, which has not been a normative Islamic value.

We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universalthat error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.

The first thing I can remember I ever wanted was to go to the United States. And for reasons that are as conventional as you can imagine: I wanted to know if it was really true that it was the land of opportunity, of democracy, and individual liberty.

It is reasonable to insist that when the government deprives a person of his or her liberty? and in this case for an indefinite period of time? that the individual have a meaningful opportunity to challenge the legality of their detention and challenge whether they are being wrongfully detained.

We should never forget that Americans continue to advocate for individual liberty, equality and self-governance. We often step in when it's necessary to help countries in need. But our history needs no whitewashing. To attempt this does us a terrible disservice.

Through your individual leadership, millions of gun owners across the nation made their voices heard sending an unmistakable message: stop President Barack Obama's destruction of our liberty and restore our Constitution.

Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite.

We need to get beyond the politics of the moment, the deficit of the hour, the military count of the day, the numbers that rarely shape events. Our long-term interests must be in people and in the values of democracy and individual liberty.

Man's liberty ends, and it ought to end, when that liberty becomes the curse of its neighbors.

Americans love their captivity. There's no responsibility. When you're a captive, you don't have to make a decision about anything, though you have no Liberty. People don't want Liberty. Liberty is nothing but uncertainty. It's much easier to have someone tell you where you'll be, what you'll do and who you'll pay tomorrow than to worry about it yourself. The same goes for what you think

Municipal laws are a supply to the wisdom of each individual; and, at the same time, by restraining the natural liberty of men, make private interest submit to the interest of the public.

I believe in limited government and the right of the individual to make choices and in a strong national defense and in freedom and liberty as being the right of every person on the face of the Earth.

The human race cannot go forward without liberty. If this be correct, then all people everywhere should strive for liberty. If they achieve liberty, they will get a chance to pursue happiness and perhaps will be able to develop toward the ultimate goal of creation.

We have the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. But in the name of freedom, people have done a lot of damage. I think we have to build a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast in order to counterbalance. Because liberty without responsibility is not true liberty. We are not free to destroy.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped . . . in the individual, and in the race.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood. The person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that person's liberty. Are you free?

The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom.

People don't seem to understand that the separation of powers is not about the power of these branches; it's there to protect individual liberty - it's there to protect us from the concentration of power.

Our flag means all that our fathers meant in the Revolutionary War. It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant. It means justice. It means liberty. It means happiness.... Every color means liberty. Every thread means liberty. Every star and stripe means liberty.

A people may prefer a free government, but if by momentary discouragement or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or trust him with powers to subvert their institutions, in all these cases they are unfit for liberty.

Writing, for me, has to do with liberty of mind. The liberty to intuit, assess, be surprised, even to be ashamed and reconsider. To feel the integrity and generosity of words, but also their disruptive violence and volatility. To even begin to do them justice requires a radical letting go and stringent attention. I was interested in following that impulse toward liberty.

We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.

You see, what makes us different than the rest of the world fundamentally is our American respect and legal appreciation of individual rights and individual property. And, I emphasize - individual.

Your love of liberty -- your respect for the laws -- your habits of industry -- and your practice of the moral and religious obligations, are the strongest claims to national and individual happiness.

China has to go along with world trends. That's democracy, liberty, individual freedom. China sooner or later has to go that way. It cannot go backward.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim and if they used both halves of their brains then they'd be libertarians. Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it ... The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.

There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.

Bloomberg believes his money can buy anything - even the liberty of individual Americans. After all, his personal fortune bought him public office.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.

Misrepresentation, false propaganda, innuendoes soon sprout into poisonous weeds, and before long the people find themselves victims of a pollution that has robbed them of their individual liberty and enslaved them to a group of political gangsters.

Freedom is born of self-discipline. No individual, no nation, can achieve or maintain liberty without self-control. The undisciplined man (or woman) is a slave to his own weaknesses.

The American people need to know that there are folks here fighting as hard as they can for individual liberty, economic freedom, appropriate national security and the fundamental moral values that have made our nation the greatest nation in the history of mankind.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.

No one individual vote, no one individual quote or no one individual statement defines me, my beliefs, or my record.

The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution . .

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.

I think the first and principle objective is to repeal Obamacare before it does lasting, fundamental damage to our health care system, to our individual liberty, to the relationship each of us has with his or her doctor.

For the next century, the Republicans have agreed that we will promote the dignity and future of every individual by building a free society under a limited, accountable government that protects liberty, security and prosperity for a brighter American dream.

When you take out individual initiative, individual responsibility, and the hope that every individual is born with, to better their lives, to climb the economic ladder, to pursue happiness, that is, in fact, a neoslavery.