Liberty Quotes - Page 52

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him and to lose himself in his ideas.

We first have to find the way of freedom from involvement before we can introduce freedom in involvement.

The western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.

Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered.

Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise.

Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried.

Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarrantors of only our own.

At the day of judgment we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.

Voters are hungry for principled, conservative fighters - because the threat to our liberties from Washington never has been greater.

As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought.

When the State is corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.

My liberty is about living. It's about spreading more love. Even though I was always a peaceful, loving individual, my music sometimes didn't reflect that. But now it's different. My music is reflecting the way I feel.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

A well-governed appetite is a great part of liberty

What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.

Poverty is the greatest cause of terrorism.

So what is so strange about saying I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to reconstruct and reform this nation so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? I want the country to survive. I want the country to succeed.

[During the 20th century] ... 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.

When those who are governed do too little, those who govern can - and often will - do too much.