Human Liberty Quotes

We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves. ~ Archibald MacLeish

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas ~ John F. Kennedy

The contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty and those who kill. [on the terrorist bombings in London, July 7, 2005 ~ George W. Bush

Evil comes in many forms and seems to reinvent itself time and again. But whatever it calls itself - Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, today, terrorism - they all have one thing in common: the destruction, the end of human liberty. ~ Stephen Harper

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty. ~ Mark Twain

The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization. ~ Henry Hazlitt

But my foreknowledge must not encroach upon their free will. "In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind clearsightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen. ~ Anatole France

Nature knows nothing of imperfection; imperfection is a human perception of nature. Inasmuch as we are part of nature we are also perfect; it is our humanity that is imperfect. And, ironically, because of our capacity for imperfection and error we are free beings - a freedom that no stone or animal can enjoy. Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless. The God that plays dice has set us free. ~ Heinz R. Pagels

The defence of human liberty against the aggressions of despotic power have been always the most efficient in States where domestic slavery was to prevail. ~ John C. Calhoun

That we suffer so much today under whatsoever flag we live is proof positive that constitutions and laws, when framed by the early advocates of human liberty, never included and were never intended for us as a people. It is only a question of sheer accident that we happen to be fellow citizens today with the descendants of those who, through their advocacy, laid the foundation for human rights. ~ Marcus Garvey

The cost of government control is human liberty, prosperity, and dignity. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

Humans are limited in the attention, kindness and compassion that they can expend to others, but AI based compassionate robots can channel virtually unlimited resources into building compassionate relationships in the society. ~ Amit Ray

A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty. ~ Mark Twain

There is no relationship here between Church and State. Religious liberty has its unalterable place, along with civil and human liberty, in the very foundation of the Republic. I hold it [religious intolerance] to be a menace to the very liberties which we boast and cherish. ~ Warren G. Harding

These are no ordinary claims; and it seems hardly possible for a rational being to regard them with even a subdued interest; much less to treat them with mere indifference and contempt. If not true they are little else than the pretensions of a bold imposture, which not satisfied with having already enslaved millions of the human race, seeks to continue its encroachments upon human liberty, until all nations be subjected under its iron rule. ~ Simon Greenleaf

There is a price tag on human liberty. That price is the willingness to assume the responsibilities of being free men. Payment of this price is a personal matter with each of us. ~ James Monroe

There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all. ~ Thomas Frank

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. 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. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppression ~ Frederick Douglass

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his Breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-Besotted Traveler; he
Served human liberty. ~ Jonathan Swift

Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Thomas Jefferson High
School [..] His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of
the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

What we need is a new consciousness concerning the idea of human liberty. ~ Llewellyn Rockwell

But while human liberty has engaged the attention of the enlightened, and enlisted the feelings of the generous of all civilized nations, may we not enquire if this liberty has been rightly understood? ~ Frances Wright

There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have ... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes
continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations
when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered. ~ Michel Foucault

Government planning not only fails; it tends to produce outcomes that are the opposite of what its proponents say that they favor. The only stable and productive social system is one that embraces human liberty in its totality, and defends the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive. ~ Llewellyn Rockwell

In asking me to contribute a mite to the memorial to Gutenberg you give me pleasure and do me honor. The world concedes without hesitation or dispute that Gutenberg's invention is incomparably the mightiest event that has ever happened in profane history. It created a new and wonderful earth, and along with it a new hell. It has added new details, new developments and new marvels to both in every year during five centuries. It found Truth walking, and gave it a pair of wings; it found Falsehood trotting, and gave it two pair. It found Science hiding in corners and hunted; it has given it the freedom of the land, the seas and the skies, and made it the world's welcome quest. It found the arts and occupations few, it multiplies them every year. It found the inventor shunned and despised, it has made him great and given him the globe for his estate. It found religion a master and an oppression, it has made it man's friend and benefactor. It found War comparatively cheap but inefficient, it has made it dear but competent. It has set peoples free, and other peoples it has enslaved; it is the father and protector of human liberty, and it has made despotisms possible where they were not possible before. Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg's invention has made it: for from that source it has all come. But he has our homage; for what he said to the reproaching angel in his dream has come true, and the evil wrought through his mighty invention is ~ Mark Twain

In later years, it was common, and I was guilty in this respect, to question the motives of those who joined the new British armies at the outbreak of the Great War, but it must, in their honour and fairness to their memories, be said that they were motivated by the highest purpose, and died in their tens of thousands in Flanders and Gallipoli, believing that they were giving their lives in the cause of human liberty everywhere, including Ireland. ~ Sean Lemass

I am tired of having hands
she said
I want wings
But what will you do without your hands
to be human?
I am tired of human
she said
I want to live on the sun - ~ Louise Gluck

We must have a religion - it goes without saying - but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition. That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel: it was only an opinion - my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't worth any more than the pope's - or any less, for that matter. ~ Mark Twain

Since God is the end of man, since he has created us to be perfect and happy in him, it is manifest that if the designs of creation have not here below been entirely frustrated, there should be found men who tend to their end in seeking and loving God. And nevertheless, because of human liberty, there should also be found other men who neglect God, their principle and their end, and yield to the seduction of created things. Such indeed is the spectacle which the history of the world unceasingly presents to us. ~ Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

Now, a third and final trait, one which, in my eyes, best describes socialists of all schools and shades, is a profound opposition to personal liberty and scorn for individual reason, a complete contempt for the individual. They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, to curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. ["Excellent."] For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him, better to guide him, to maintain him, in a word, to confine him. They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, [Further signs of assent.] to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom. ~ Tocqueville

Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless. ~ Heinz R. Pagels

If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the behavior then becomes unnatural and worthy of condemnation. Better to stick resolutely to a philosophical position on human liberty: what free adults do with each other in their own private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated and must not be condemned by genetic speculation. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and, besides, I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought. ~ Mark Twain

I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride - humility in the weight of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this home of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised. ~ Douglas MacArthur

SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. ~ John Stuart Mill

One of the bravest, grandest champions of human liberty the world has ever seen.

{Darrow on the great Robert Ingersoll} ~ Clarence Darrow

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

While politicians contend, and men are swerved this way and that by conflicting tides of interest and passion, the great cause of human liberty is in the hands of one ... who shall not fail nor be discouraged ... ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Third Way is simply a different route to the same destination. Ultimately, the choice is always between individual human liberty and the power of government to control our lives. ~ Ed Crane

Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers ... every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labour performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child - every solitary one was a Democrat. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

[George Everett Macdonald was] a valiant soldier for human liberty. ~ Clarence Darrow

Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I've ever met were people in revolt. It wasn't enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God - they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: 'Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.' They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don't suppose you recognize yourself in this description. ~ Michel Houellebecq

In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from. ~ Eric Hoffer

I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and taking on a specific richness ... I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and brittle, and of edges polished by use. ~ Peter Zumthor

This is the first nation that organized government on the basis of universal liberty with a free Church and a free State. This meant much at the time; it means much now and will continue to be the beacon of light and guidance for ourselves and of other nations. All that is good and practical and wise in the new developments can best be worked out under our form of government without destroying any of the basic principles upon which it rests. ~ Oscar Straus

For there are two reasons why human beings face danger calmly: they may have no experience of it, or they may have means to deal with it: thus when in danger at sea people may feel confident about what will happen either because they have no experience of bad weather, or because their experience gives them the means of dealing with it. ~ Aristotle.

No matter how much you love someone, on a bad day, you could say something terrible. All of the little things that you are saving to say, that you're mad about but never express, sometimes come out, all at once. We all have these terrible moments. That's just part of being human. ~ Judd Apatow

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone. ~ Charles Bukowski

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order. ~ Pablo Picasso

It had been a dangerous gamble - and unfair to the Hemlocks, who knew nothing of their role in the deadly game - but sometimes you have to take chances. Was it wise to risk five lives for the sake of one? Probably not. But it was human. If I'd learned one thing from my one encounter with the crazy vampaneze, it was that even the undead could be human. We had to be - without a touch of humanity, we'd be like Murlough, nothing more than bloodthirsty monsters of the night. ~ Darren Shan

Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human raceis imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads. ~ George Bernard Shaw

No electricity, fridge, TV or game console. I guess changing from human was enough fun and games for werewolves. ~ Jazz Feylynn

'Truly, truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in My Name, He will give it to you. Till now you have asked nothing in My Name; ask and you will receive, that your joy may be full' (Jn. 16:23). What a wonderful gift! It is a guarantee of unending, infinite blessings! It came from the lips of the unlimited God, clothed in limited humanity and called by the human name of Savior. The name by its exterior form is limited, but it represents an unlimited object, God, from Whom it borrows infinite, divine value or worth, the power and properties of God. ~ Ignatius Bryanchaninov

I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction
even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons. ~ Kage Baker

Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings. ~ Anne Lamott

You died to teach me that I was wrong -- that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in the hope that it wouldn't happen to them, until the human world died, and we all fell into this preta realm and then to hell. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. ~ Lewis Thomas

Men have few restraints in expressing to prostitutes - during sex or in any sexual scenario - their real attitudes toward women as a class; they have no reason to feel constrained, since the woman is there to be a woman, period - to be inferior, subservient, and used. She is there because the man wants a woman, someone exactly of her class, someone who is her sex function, not human but an it, a cunt: she is there for that reason, not for anything human in her. Her function is limited, specialized, sex-specific, and intensely and intrinsically dehumanizing. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Whereas liberalism merged with the milder versions of nationalism to protect the unique experiences of each human community, evolutionary humanists such as Hitler identified particular nations as the engines of human progress, and concluded that these nations ought to bludgeon or even exterminate anyone standing in their way. It should be remembered, though, that Hitler and the Nazis represent only one extreme version of evolutionary humanism. Just as Stalin's gulags do not automatically nullify every socialist idea and argument, so too the horrors of Nazism should not blind us to whatever insights evolutionary humanism might offer. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty ~ Thabo Mbeki

The human body heals itself and nutrition provides the resources to accomplish the task. ~ Roger Williams

The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. ~ Hannah Arendt

Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Has it never occurred to you that that miserable clown may have a soul–a living, struggling human soul, tied down into that crooked hulk of a body and forced to slave for it? You that are so tender-hearted to everything–you that pity the body in its fool's dress and bells–have you never thought of the wretched soul that has not even motley to cover its horrible nakedness? Think of it shivering with cold, stilled with shame and misery, before all those people–feeling their jeers that cut like a whip–their laughter, that burns like red-hot iron on the bare flesh! Think of it looking round–so helpless before them all–for the mountains that will not fall on it–for the rocks that have not the heart to cover it–envying the rats that can creep into some hole in the earth and hide; and remember that a soul is dumb–it has no voice to cry out–it must endure, and endure, and endure. ~ Ethel Lilian Voynich

Every occupation has its own honor before God. Ordinary work is a divine vocation or calling. In our daily work no matter how important or mundane we serve God by serving the neighbor and we also participate in God's on-going providence for the human race. ~ Martin Luther

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool. ~ Linda Stone

He [Jesus] was the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I've ever encountered in my life or in my reading. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world ... ~ Charles Templeton

Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered. ~ Rene Descartes

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans. ~ Roy Baumeister

Either the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits ... One should ... be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh. ~ David Bentley Hart

Most people just do not give a crap. Especially about you. It is not because you're crap. Mostly it is so because they are. So, you're better than them. Yeah! Now, give a crap! ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

One of them confessed to Paul that his tribe had heard stories about the fiercely cannibalistic ways of white men. Paul's first instinct was to laugh him off as a simpleminded fool. But the legend hadn't been conjured from thin air. When Paul tried to assure him that white men didn't eat black men, the man confronted him with a direct challenge: explain why they bought and sold Africans as if they were cattle, not human beings.
"Why do you come from nobody knows where, and carry off our men, and women, and children?" the man asked Paul. "Do you not fatten them in your far country and eat them? ~ Monte Reel

Human nature is so complicated. Those who have little, want a lot. Those who have a lot, think others have more. Those who lose, blame others for the loss. ~ Eraldo Banovac

Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'. ~ Paul Auster

Only God possesses the love and wisdom necessary to deal with human pride in a consistently constructive manner. ~ Hugh Ross

I swore with his newfound love of bathing, I would see Isaac in human clothes next. If he started wearing skinny jeans, I would have to intervene. ~ Ashlan Thomas

Trying to think inside Finn's head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees. ~ Meg Rosoff

This Son is a god who walked, a pedestrian god - and in a hot place, at that - with a stride like any human stride, the sandal reaching just above the rocks along the way; and when He splurged on transportation, it was a regular donkey. This Son is a god who died in three hours, with moans, gasps and laments. What kind of a god is that? What is there to inspire in this Son? Love, said Father Martin. ~ Yann Martel