Billy Sunday Quotes

The love of individual freedom has stood in the way of the appreciation of social obligations.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.

Freedom is a personal experience; a free society is an association of free individuals, nothing else. Freedom consists simply in the absence of external restraints on thought and behavior. Yet, because the individual, in his efforts to improve upon his circumstances, not infrequently transgresses the equal freedom of his fellow man, restraint becomes a necessary condition of social living; it is the means of maintaining an equilibrium, or justice.

To affirm my own rights I must define and affirm the rights of others.

The very freedom we seek cannot be attained until we chain some of our exaggerated individuality.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other mans freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

Liberty—liberty within the law—and civilization are inseparable.

When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship. Instead of finding himself restricted and confined by rendering obedience to public law, he finds himself protected and defended and in the exercise of increased and increasing rights.

The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other

It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these value, we do so at our peril.

What has not changed is people are still doing whatever they think they can get away with. I think there's still a lot of advancement for people, generally speaking, to learn to let other people live in the world with freedom.

The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.

Do any deserve liberty who are not ready to give it to others? Let us calmly go to work, instead of dissipating our energy in unnecessary fretting and fuming.

I want to be able to get my point across. I respect people expressing their freedoms and their liberties and their rights, but at the same time I'm almost mindful that my freedoms can be other people's downfalls. I don't want to flash my freedoms in your face all the time, especially if they're going to be detrimental. I can get you to understand my point without going overboard, and we're cool.

Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

There can be no liberty without the law.

Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.

I believe in trying to get a balance between individual freedom on the one hand and social responsibility on the other.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

Man's liberty ends, and it ought to end, when that liberty becomes the curse of its neighbors.