Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Liberty

"Where slavery is, there liberty cannot be; and where liberty is, there slavery cannot be." - Abraham Lincoln

"When the human being has attained true maturity, the state will become obsolete. It will finally be done away with as an unnatural infringement upon human liberty, and as a perversion of life's inherent simplicities." - Judah Low

"The inescapable price of liberty is an ability to preserve it from destruction." - Douglas MacArthur

"There is no liberty without security, and no security without unity." - André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog

"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind-that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"Let us never endure the loss of the greatest of all human blessings, liberty, the beginning and fountain of all happiness!" - Moses Mendelssohn

"Luxury is... absolutely necessary in monarchies; as it is also in despotic states. In the former, it is the use of liberty; in the latter, it is the abuse of servitude. A slave appointed by his master to tyrannize over other wretches of the same condition, uncertain of enjoying tomorrow the blessings of today, has no other felicity that that of glutting the pride, the passions, and the voluptuousness of the present moment." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"The pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of the child, and liberty is activity... Discipline must come through liberty." - Maria Montessori

"Liberty and Equality are the twin ideals of American democracy. But they are not the same thing... Many person who would gladly die for liberty are appalled by equality. Many who are devoted to equality are puzzled and even troubled by liberty. Much of the political history of the American nation can be seen as a competition between these two ideals." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan, aka "Pat"

"Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State.... Fascism is for liberty... the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State." -

"A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity - and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep." -

"That in which every man is interested, is every man’s duty to support; and any burden which falls equally on all men, and from which every man is to receive an equal benefit, is consistent with the most perfect ideas of liberty." - Thomas Paine

"Property is theft; property is liberty: these two propositions stand side by side in my System of Economic Contradictions and each is shown to be true." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Tell men that God is love; that right is right, and wrong, wrong; let them cease to admire philanthropy, and begin to love men; cease to pant for heaven, and begin to love God; then the spirit of liberty begins." -

"Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in Speech." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to it alone... What then is government? An intermediate body set up between the subjects and the Sovereign, to secure their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of liberty, both civil and political." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards. To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." -

"I believe democracy to be of all forms of government the most natural and the most consonant with individual liberty. In it no one transfers his natural right so absolutely that he has no further voice in affairs, he only hands it over to the majority of a society, whereof he is a unit. Thus all men remain, as they were in the state of nature, equals." -

"The ultimate aim of Government is not to rule or restrain by fear, not to exact obedience, but on the contrary, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself and others. The object of government is not to hang men from rational beings into puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled... The true aim of Government is liberty." -

"The ultimate aim of government is... to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security... In fact, the true aim of government is liberty." -

"War mends but few, and spoils multitudes; it legitimates rapine and authorizes murder; and these crimes must be ministered to by their lesser relatives, by covetousness and anger and pride and revenge, and heats of blood, and wilder liberty, and all the evil that can be supposed to come from or run to such cursed causes of mischief." - Jeremy Taylor

"It is said that it is far more difficult to hold and maintain leadership [liberty] than it is to attain it. Success is a ruthless competitor for it flatters and nourishes our weaknesses and lulls us into complacency." -

"Despotism may govern without faith, but Liberty cannot." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"There is a vast difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession; liberty is a right; toleration is a matter of expediency; liberty is a matter of principle; toleration is a grant of man; liberty is a gift of God." - George Washington Truett

"It must be admitted that liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry

"Knowledge is the only fountain, both of the love and the principles of human liberty." - Daniel Webster

"The preservation of liberty is a contest, but it is not a spectator sport. We cannot remain on the sidelines while professionals play the game for us." - Willard M. Wilson

"Life, not death, is man's misfortune. It is death which gives liberty to the soul and permits it to depart to its own pure abode, there to be free from all calamity." - Eleazar ben Ya'ir

"Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force." - John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"What is threatened today is moral liberty, conscience, respect for the soul, the very nobility of man. To defend the soul, its interests, its rights, its dignity, is the most pressing duty for whoever sees the danger." - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"An innate knowledge, or rather an acquired ignorance, suggests to it straightaway the step to be taken, the decisive act, the unanswerable word. Yet effort remains indispensable, endurance and perseverance likewise. But they come of themselves, they develop of their own accord, in a soul acting and acted upon, whose liberty coincides with the divine activity." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"The good of the people is the ultimate and true end of government… Now, the greatest good of the people is their liberty." - Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

"There is probably no direct way to get in touch with our inner selves or to seek out satisfaction and happiness. It’s best to live by sound principles – honesty, courage, liberty, and love – and then to await what unfolds. When, inevitably, we go astray for a time, we must return, once again, to living by the principles we cherish. The formula isn’t all that difficult to understand; applying it is the work of a lifetime." - Peter R. Breggin

"Peace is liberty in tranquility." -

"He who unreservedly accepts whatever God may give him in this world – humiliation, trouble, and trial from within or from without – has made a great step towards self-victory; he will not dread praise or censure, he will not be sensitive; or if he finds himself wincing, he will deal so cavalierly with his sensitiveness that it will soon die away. Such full resignation and unfeigned acquiescence is true liberty, and hence arises perfect simplicity." -

"No human power can force the impenetrable entrenchments of liberty in the human heart. Force can never persuade men; it can only make them hypocrites." -

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

"Grace does not destroy our liberty by its certain efficacy; rather by that very efficacy divine grace moves the free will without doing violence to it." - Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, fully Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange

"Freedom of speech and expression, and the right of all men to disseminate ideas, popular or unpopular, are fundamental to ordered liberty. Government has not power or right to control men’s minds, thoughts and expressions… If the First Amendment protects the freedom to express ideas, it necessarily follows that it must protect the freedom to generate ideas. Without the latter protection, the former is meaningless." -

"The possibility of morality thus depends on the possibility of liberty; for if man be not a free agent, he is not the author of his actions, and has, therefore, no responsibility - no moral personality at all." -

"I believe that, for the rest of the world, contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the best and the worst of our civilization. On the one hand, there are its profound commitment to enhancing civil liberty and to maintaining the strength of its democratic institutions, and the fantastic developments in science and technology which have contributed so much to our well-being; on the other, there is the blind worship of perpetual economic growth and consumption, regardless of their destructive impact on the environment, or how subject they are to the dictates of materialism and consumerism, or how they, through the omnipresence of television and advertising, promote uniformity, and banality instead of a respect for human uniqueness." - Václav Havel

"Liberty and responsibility are inseparable." - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek

"The price we pay for liberty is that so far as a man is free to do right he is also free to do wrong." - L. T. Hobhouse, fully Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." - David Hume

"On liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." - Thomas Jefferson

"Timid men… prefer the calm despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

"Frugality may be termed the daughter of prudence, the sister of temperance, and the parent of liberty. Those that are extravagant will quickly become poor, and poverty will enforce dependence and invite corruption." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Resolve not to be poor, whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness, it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson