Freedom Quotes

“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”  Dwight Eisenhower

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”   Benjamin Franklin

 “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”     Louis Brandeis (U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice)

“Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our
bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty
as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and
you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize
yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to
wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have
lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the
first cunning tyrant who rises [among you].”    Abraham Lincoln

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” – James Madison   Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788

“When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves, and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.”  George Washington

“The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to Life, Liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”      Robert K Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

” It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what is will be tomorrow.” – James Madison Federalist Papers, No. 62, February 27, 1788

The Declaration of Independence states that “we were endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It further states that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.”

“The moment a man says, give up your rights here is money, there is tyranny. It comes masquerading in monks’ cowls, and in citizens’ coats, comes savagely or comes politely. But it is tyranny.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson

“As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?” – James Madison Federalist Papers, No. 63, 1788

“This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” – James Madison  Federalist Papers, No. 58, 1788

“The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness…. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”            PLATO, The Republic