Top 738 Liberties Quotes & Sayings

The pacifist thinks that the alternative to war is peace; it is not. Sometimes the alternative is oppression. Sometimes certain God-given rights and liberties can be preserved only by resistance to that which would destroy them. And to defend certain basic God-given rights and liberties is not immoral but righteous.

Liberal Democrats in government will not follow the last Labour government by sounding the retreat on the protection of civil liberties in the United Kingdom. It continues to be essential that our civil liberties are safeguarded, and that the state is not given the powers to snoop on its citizens at will.

The beauty of our country is that when it was founded that they took some time to lay out civil liberties in the first 10 Amendments - the Bill of Rights. I'm a firm believer in those civil liberties and the ability to have your own opinion.

FREEDOM CANNOT BE LICENSED, liberties cannot be regulated and rights cannot be granted. History teaches us that when the rights and liberties of a free people have restrictions upon them, they cease to be freedoms and rights. Instead, the government becomes like a king, bestowing privileges upon the chosen few and servitude upon everyone else.

A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.

We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set.

There is a fundamental difference between separation of church and state and denying the spiritual heritage of this country. Inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. are Jefferson's words, 'The God Who gave us life gave us liberty -- can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?'

We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.

Liberty is from God; liberties, from the devil.

Little liberties are great offenses.

The people's liberties strengthen the king's prerogative, and the king's prerogative is to defend the people's liberties.

Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

Republicans are horrible with civil liberties, and not so good with dollars and cents. Democrats are horrible with dollars and cents, and not so good with civil liberties.

Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.

Politicians have always coveted the liberties we hold.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have remover their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.

[P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction.

We can afford no liberties with liberty itself.

The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night. So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time.

Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases.

In the defense of civil liberties there can be no exceptions, or there will soon be many.

If religion and churches are truly threats to our liberties, how did those liberties survive, and in such healthy condition, all those years of classroom prayer and Bible-reading?

When under siege, if we do not stand for our liberties and for the liberties of those who are unable to stand for themselves, then the great American experience will come to an end.

The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but is instead a threat to our liberties.

For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours.

All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every additional amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties. We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring us a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert.

I think that there’s going to be a rush to judgment on civil liberties, and a clamping down, a suspension of our democratic rights. And I believe that those who are good Americans would want to see this not happen and that we debate how to find a balance between the public safety and the protection of civil liberties.

We have less civil liberties than we had on 9/ 1 1 in some significant ways. But we are also, I believe, less safe as a result in many instances of the sacrifice in human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law that (the Bush) administration has adopted.

The liberties of a people depend on their own constant attention to its preservation.

I fear for the democratic system. And I fear for our liberties. Only a small group of people fights for our liberties. Once we start on the slippery slope and those people are put in jeopardy, then we're really in trouble.

O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end. You have nothing but trouble before you. . . . Your liberties will be lost.

Liberties are not given, they are taken.

I think when people talk about civil liberties, they sometimes forget that action taken to protect the citizen against physical violence and physical attack is a blow in favour and not a blow against civil liberties.

Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions... Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions.

The flag represents all the values and the liberties Americans have and enjoy everyday.

The role of the federal government is to protect our liberties. That means they should protect our religious liberties to do what we want; our intellectual liberty, but it also should protect our right to do to our body what we want, you know, what we take into our bodies.

There are people who are always going to try to engage in activity that is illegal and they're going to try to subvert surveillance. But everybody should not give up their liberties and rights to privacy because some people are going to [do that]. We shouldn't stop or limit our basic liberties because some people are going to engage in criminal activities.

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

With a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that events been conflated and that liberties have been taken, characters ditto, dates rearranged. But people don't seem to understand that movies are fictions, they are dramatizations, at least historical movies, and we should accord the moviemakers some of the same understanding and latitude. When you go to a movie you know it's a dramatization and not history.

When life has gone into overtime it's easy to take liberties.

I was on the state board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union.

It was by one Union that we achieved our independence and liberties, and by it alone can they be maintained.

For me, it was definitely an education in being grateful. And appreciating the civil liberties we have today, the natural liberties we have at home.

The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.

I don't think I should tell you what to do, nor should the government. As long as you enjoy your own personal liberties and don't infringe on the liberties of others, I don't care.

I'm convinced that you never have to give up liberties to be safe. I think you're less safe when you give up your liberties.

You either respect people's liberties, or you don't.

I think nowadays economic liberties are an explosive issue.

If you see the rhetoric from coming out of the Democrats is that they're pro-civil liberties, and an important part of civil liberties is respect for the First Amendment and the rule of law, and that has broken down under the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton was part of that process.

In no instance have... the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

Are we going to continue to yield personal liberties and community autonomy to the steady inexplicable centralization all political power or restore the Republic to Constitutional direction, regain our personal liberties and reassume the individual state's primary responsibility and authority in the conduct of local affairs? Are we going to permit a continuing decline in public and private morality or re-establish high ethical standards as the means of regaining a diminishing faith in the integrity of our public and private institutions?

Norms appearing in the form of law entitle actors to exercise their rights or liberties. However, one cannot determine which of these laws are legitimate simply by looking at the form of individual rights. Only by bringing in the discourse principle can one show that each person is owed a right to the greatest possible measure of equal liberties that are mutually compatible.

My countrymen, I have given proofs that I am one most anxious for liberties for our country, and I am still desirous of them. But I place as a prior condition the education of the people, that by means of instruction and industry our country may have an individuality of its own and make itself worthy of these liberties.

The government should always be the one defending civil liberties.

If we're ignorant of the historical sacrifices that made our liberties possible, we will be less likely to make the sacrifices again so that those liberties are preserved for future generations. And, if we're ignorant, we won't even know when government infringes on our liberties. Moreover, we'll happily cast our votes for those who'd destroy our liberties.

No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.

Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law.

The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?

Civil liberties, good. Lawyers, bad.