Liberty Quotes - Page 62

Liberty is the right to do what I like; licence, the right to do what you like.

It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes.

What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.

Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Beauty and folly are old companions.

He does not possess wealth; it possesses him.

The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

Capitalism demands the best of every man - his rationality - and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.

In levying taxes and in shearing sheep, it is well to stop when you get down to the skin.

The proper balance between individual liberty and central authority is a very ancient problem.

All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Mens Understandings.

There is nothing that I shudder at more than the idea of a separation of the Union. Should such an event ever happen, which I fervently pray God to avert, from that date I view our liberty gone.

In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.

Laws and constitutions ought to be weighed... to constitute that which is most conducing to the establishment of justice and liberty.

A tyranny based on ... deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty

Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force.

If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development.

Though authority be a stubborn bear, yet he is oft let by the nose with gold.

[I]f we assume a liberty interest but nevertheless say that, even assuming a liberty interest, a state can prohibit it entirely, that would be rather a conundrum.

The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.

The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court... the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it.

In commemoration of the fact that France was our ally in securing independence the citizens of that nation joined with the citizens of the United States in placing in New York harbor an heroic statue representing Liberty enlightening the world. What course shall our nation pursue? Send the statue of Liberty back to France and borrow from England a statue of William the Conqueror?