This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is no man in any rank who is always at liberty to act as he would incline. In some quarter or other he is limited by circumstances." - Hugh Blair
"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." - Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
"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." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things - that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from that which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only to protection to His realm." - Horace Bushnell
"Freedom is not free. Shaping and preserving society necessarily involves personal commitment, costly risk and constant effort; the cultivation of civil liberty can be no more passive than the cultivation of a farm. A man can inherit the land on which he lives, he can even inherit the first crop of produce after he takes over from those who came before him. But then if he stops, everything stops, and begins to crumble. Nothing grows, nothing ripe and rewarding comes to him, unless he plows, plants and tends the soil and unless he keeps it fertile year after year with the chemistry of effort and forethought." - Edmond Cahn, fully Edmond Nathaniel Cahn
"People do not understand liberty or majorities. The will of the majority is the will of a rabble. Democracy is leveling - this is inconsistent with true liberty." - John Caldwell Calhoun
"There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivises. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating." - Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
"Neither piety, nor liberty can long flourish in a community where the education of youth is neglected." - Albert Cooper, fully Albert Glen Cooper
"Individuality is the aim of political liberty." - James Fenimore Cooper
"The sure foundations of the State are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue’s sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin." - George William Curtis
"O liberty, parent of happiness, a celestial born when the first man became a living soul; his sacred genius thou." - Edward Dyer, fully Sir Edward Dyer
"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army." - David Everett
"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. If we retrench the wages of the schoolmaster, we must raise those of the recruiting sergeant." - Edward Everett
"Beware of fatiguing them by ill-judged exactness. If virtue offers itself to the child under a melancholy and constrained aspect, while liberty and license present themselves under an agreeable form, all is lost, and your labor is in vain." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant." - E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster
"Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors." - Benjamin Franklin
"The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression." - French National Assembly - Declaration of the Rights of Man NULL
"Liberty is the right to silence." - French Student Revolt Graffiti NULL
"Not until right is founded upon reverence will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal." - Henry Giles
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lives there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must live in the heart of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to so as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow." -
"The bravest and best men of all times have perished in the struggles against tyranny and despotism, and free government has never secured even a feeble existence save at a most fearful cost. The experiment of republican government in our own country is similar to that of all others. Here, however, liberty has won her grandest triumphs. Here freedom is enthroned securely and is the unchallenged boon of every inhabitant. But we contemplate the cost of victory with mournful and pitying hearts." - Harrison Eugene Havens
"Indignation boils my blood at the thought of the heritage we are throwing away; at the thought that, with few exceptions, the fight for freedom is left to the poor, forlorn and defenseless, and to the few radicals and revolutionaries who would make use of liberty to destroy, rather than to maintain, American institutions." - Arthur Garfield Hays
"What has become of the descendants of the irresponsible adventurers, the scapegrace sons, the bond servants, the redemptionists and the indentured maidens, the undesirables, and even the criminals, which made up, not all, of course, but nevertheless a considerable part of, the earliest emigrants to these virgin countries? They have become the leaders of the thought of the world, the vanguard in the march of progress, the inspirers of liberty, the creators of national prosperity, the sponsors of universal education and enlightenment." - William Randolph Hearst
"Marriage today must... be concerned not with the inviolable commitment of constancy and unending passion, but with the changing patterns of liberty and discovery." - Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, pen name Amanda Cross
"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. It is not something we can get others to pay for us. To let others carry the responsibilities of freedom and the work and worry that accompany them - while we share only in the benefits - may be a very human impulse, but it is likely to be fatal." - Eugene Holman
"Even if governmental conduct of business could give us more efficiency instead of less efficiency, the fundamental objection to it would remain unaltered and unabated. It would destroy political equality. It would increase rather than decrease abuse and corruption. It would stifle initiative and invention. It would undermine the development of leadership. It would cramp and cripple the mental and spiritual energies of our people. It would extinguish equality and opportunity. It would dry up the spirit of liberty and progress." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
"Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself." - William Dean Howells
"All men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." - Thomas Jefferson
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." - Thomas Jefferson
"There is a freedom greater even than the freedom conferred by citizenship and the possession of full human rights. It is the freedom of the soul - of the soul that "walks at liberty because it has sought God's precepts," that visualizes the best and strenuously aspires after it. The greatest of boons has still to be attained." - Morris Joseph
"Liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"I know that there is one God in heaven, the Father of all humanity, and heaven is therefore one. I know that there is one sun in the sky, which gives light to all the world. As there is unity in God, and unity in the light, so is there unity in the principles of freedom. Whatever it is broken, wherever a shadow is cast upon the sunny rays of the sun of liberty, there is always danger of free principles everywhere in the world." - Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva
"Liberty is a living thing that passes from one generation to the next... The greatest enemy of a living thing is not its enemies but its friends who wish to cling to its antiquated form." - Ludwig Lewisohn
"Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty." - Abraham Lincoln
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? ... Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us... Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, 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