• "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression."
  -- Thomas Paine

  
  

• "Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought."
  -- Lord Acton

  
  

• "Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production."
  -- Ludwig von Mises

  
  

• "And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty: for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."
  -- Frederic Bastiat

  
  

• "Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning."
  -- Frederick Douglass

  
  

• "One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation."
  -- Thomas B. Reed

  
  

• "Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself"
  -- Alexander Hamilton

  
  

• "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
  -- Benjamin Franklin

  
  

• "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

  
  

• "Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth ever afterward resumes its liberty."
  -- Walt Whitman

  
  

• "Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
  -- Thomas Paine, The Crisis Number IV

  
  

• "Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
  -- Albert Einstein

  
  

• "Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."
  -- Harry Emerson Fosdick

  
  

• "If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
  -- Samuel Adams

  
  

• "Can our form of government, our system of justice, survive if one can be denied a freedom because he might abuse it?"
  -- Harlon Carter

  
  

• "Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

  
  

• "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
  -- John Bradshaw

  
  

• "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
  -- P.J. O'Rourke

  
  

• "The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
  -- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" (1859)

  
  

• "It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve."
  -- Henry George

  
  

• "We prefer self-government with danger, to servitude with tranquillity."
  -- Kwame Nkrumah, Founder of Ghana (1958)

  
  

• "The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
  -- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" (1859)

  
  

• "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too."
  -- Somerset Maugham

  
  

• "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
  -- George Bernard Shaw