I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
- Voltaire
- The Friends of Voltaire
Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the colour of their skin.
- Wendell Wilkie
It is to the free and multifarious movements of human activity that civilization owes its most noteable achievements.
- C. C. Allen
- Economic Fact and Fantasy
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment of men of zeal, well-meaning but without under-standing.
- Justice Louis Brandeis Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 479 (1928)
If we look to our responsibility to the generations yet unborn who will come after us, how can we fail to recognize that peace and freedom are inextricably bound up one with another and that the threat to one is a threat to both.
- Sir Winston Churchill 1976
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
- Adlai Stevenson
A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives….. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.
- Milton and Rose Friedman
- Free to Choose
A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy the freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.
- Milton and Rose Friedman
- Free to Choose
Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like. Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but in the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than the bad.
- Friedrich Hayek
- The Constitution of Liberty
Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
- Patrick Henry
- Virginia Convention 1795
The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
- W. R. Inge
- The End of an Age
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
- Walter Lippman
- An Enquiry into the Principles of a Good Society
Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
- John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state - and nothing else.
- Ayn Rand
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
- Lawrence Reed.
Freedom incurs responsibility; that is why so many men fear it.
- George Bernard Shaw
- Maxims for Revolutionists.
Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
- Milton Friedman
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