Themes

"For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is."

"Not until right is founded upon reverence, will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love, will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles, will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal."

"Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty."

"Where liberty is, there is my country."

"True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will."

"The sun of liberty is set; you must light up the candle of industry and economy."

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."

"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards. And the effective administration of criminal justice hardly requires disregard of fair procedures imposed by law."

"I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party."

"Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world."

"Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible--from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists."

"The love of liberty with life is given, And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven."

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."

"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

"Liberty I will have, or die in the attempt to gain it."

"Indeed nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel; and therefore nations in general have lost their liberty."

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."

"Then liberty, like day, Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from Heaven Fires all the faculties with glorious joy."

"'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume; And we are weeds without it."

"Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty."

"The finest achievement of the new woman has been personal liberty. This is the foundation of civilization."

"Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, Possessing all things with intensest love, O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there."

"To those who can hear me, I say — do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish."

"When Liberty from Greece withdrew, And o'er the Adriatic flew, To where the Tiber pours his urn, She struck the rude Tarpeian rock; Sparks were kindled by the shock— Again thy fires began to burn."

"Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, For there thy habitation is the heart— The heart which love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd— To fetters and damp vault's dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom."

"The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. On one side are those who believe in the values of freedom and moderation; the right of all people to speak, and worship, and live in liberty. And on the other side are those driven by the values of tyranny and extremism; the right of a self-appointed few to impose their fanatical views on all the rest. As veterans, you have seen this kind of enemy before. They're successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists, and other totalitarians of the 20th century. And history shows what the outcome will be. This war will be difficult; this war will be long; and this war will end in the defeat of the terrorists and totalitarians, and a victory for the cause of freedom and liberty."

"When people live in freedom, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue campaigns of terror. When people have hope in the future, they will not cede their lives to violence and extremism. So around the world, America is promoting human liberty, human rights, and human dignity. We are standing with dissidents and young democracies, providing AIDS medicine to bring dying patients back to life, and sparing mothers and babies from malaria. And this great republic born alone in liberty is leading the world toward a new age when freedom belongs to all nations."

"The prosperity, and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by the extent of their liberty."

"Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow! Let us do or die."

"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."

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts."

"All who have ever written on government are unanimous, that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist."

"When I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection — when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me — my rigour relents — I pardon something to the spirit of liberty...."

"The distinguishing part of our Constitution is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate seems the particular duty and proper trust of a member of the House of Commons. But the liberty, the only liberty, I mean is a liberty connected with order: that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle."

"That the greatest security of the people, against the encroachments and usurpations of their superiors, is to keep the Spirit of Liberty constantly awake, is an undeniable truth."

"What is dignity? The measure of Liberty. Giannina Braschi, Yo-Yo Boing! (1998)"

"Liberty is not an option. It is a human right. Giannina Braschi, El Nuevo Dia (2012)"

"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government."

"The defendants' objections to the evidence obtained by wire-tapping must, in my opinion, be sustained. It is, of course, immaterial where the physical connection with the telephone wires leading into the defendants' premises was made. And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. 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 insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

"The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty."

"LIBERTY, n. One of Imagination's most precious possessions."

"Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class."

"Liberty is an empty sound as long as you are kept in bondage economically. [...] Freedom means that you have the right to do a certain thing; but if you have no opportunity to do it, that right is sheer mockery. The opportunity lies in your economic condition, whatever the political situation may be. No political rights can be of the least use to the man who is compelled to slave all his life to keep himself and family from starvation."

"It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood."

"I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each — an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being — they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom."

"What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control."