David Antin Quotes

There in the city's steam-and-smoke-smudged harbor is the most extraordinary sight of all: a great copper-clad lady with a torch in one hand and a book in the other. It is not a statesman or a god or a war hero who welcomes us to this new world. It is but an ordinary woman lighting the way- a lady offering us the liberty to pursue our dreams if we've the courage to begin.

I should like to be remembered as the man who raised a voice against... placing limitations on the freedom of the individual.

In England, your life is your life.

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying, 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and yelling, 'You want a piece of me?'

The Statue of Liberty is for Blacks a … joke.

Liberty Enlightening the World

Liberty is not collective. It is personal.

The perception of the right of every man to do pretty much as he pleases…. [which will produce] a general profligacy and corruption such as this country has never known.

… full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.

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

… it [liberty] denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home, bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience and generally, to enjoy those privileges long recognized in common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right, to choose his own surroundings.

I believe everybody got the right to live their own life the way they want to.

I am for . . . each individual doing just as he chooses in all matters which concern nobody else.

There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity--those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price.

After all, I do not have so many ways of proving that I am free. We is always free at the expense of someone else. It is a bother,but it is normal.

While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.

The most powerful visual in America today is actually the Statue of Liberty.

Whoever then wishes to be free, let him neither wish for anything nor avoid anything which depends on others: if he does not observe this rule, he must be a slave.

You don't have freedom unless you have the freedom to do stupid self-destructive things.

Lady Liberty and Sarah Palin are lit by the same torch.

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

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.

The idea that I hear from the right wing in the last few decades, is that any sort of sacrifice is an affront to my liberty as an American to be a pig the way I want to.