liberty

Freedom is actually a bigger game than power.  Power is about what you can control.  Freedom is about what you can unleash. (Harriet Rubin, American writer and consultant)

Freedom is not a thing you can receive as a gift.  A man who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is a free man.   A man who struggles for what he believes to be right is a free man. (Ignazio Silone, Italian writer, 1900-1978)

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit. (Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese mystic, painter and poet, 1883-1931)

We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our society. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd president of the USA, 1882-1945)

"We have the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. But in the name of freedom, people have done a lot of damage. I think we have to build a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast in order to counterbalance. Because liberty without responsibility is not true liberty. We are not free to destroy."

Means and ends are central. If your means are corroded, your ends will be corroded. And if you're fighting to preserve liberty and you use means that eviscerate our liberties, the end will be corroded, too.

“The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect.”

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. . . . The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.

The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.

The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist . . . concentration of power we are resisting the powers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.

William Symonds, in his 1612 history of the Virginia colonies, also omits the Pocahontas episode, relating instead that Smith secured his release through his own clever connivance: "A month those Barbarians kept him prisoner, many strange triumphes and conjurations they made of him, yet hee so demeaned himselfe amongst them, as he not only diverted them from surprising the Fort, but procured his owne liberty, and got himselfe and his company such estimation amongst them, that those Salvages admired him as a demi-God. ...So he had inchanted those poor soules (being their prisoner) in demonstrating unto them the roundnesse of the world, the course of the moone and starres, the cause of the day and night the largenes of the seas the quallities of our ships, shot and powder, The devision of the world, with the diversity of people, their complexions, customs and conditions. All which he fained to be under the command of Captaine Newport, whom he tearmed to them his father; of whose arrival, it chanced he so directly prophesied, as they esteemed him an oracle; by these fictions he not only saved his owne life, and obtained his liberty, but had them at that command, he might command what he listed."