John Adams Quotes

The Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.

There is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

The Anarchists believe in the State; only they insist that the greater part, if not all, of the necessity for its existence is the result of an artificial limitation of the freedom of civil society, and that the completion of industrial freedom may one day so harmonize individuals that it will no longer be necessary to provide a guarantee of political freedom.

Liberty is best preserved, where the legislative power is lodged in several persons, especially if those persons are of different ranks and interests; for where they are of the same rank, and consequently have an interest to manage peculiar to that rank, it differs but little from a despotical government in a single person.

Our liberty cannot depend on the good intention of those in power.

If the President takes away from the strong man the right to hit the little man over the head with a club, is that too great curtailment of liberty? We must assure the little man's right not to be clubbed.

Liberty dies in the hearts of men and women: when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.

True liberal government is founded on the emancipation of men.

Our Founders were not naive simpletons. They understood that human freedom is a fragile thing, that 'eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.'

I'm the most pro-liberty elected official statewide in my lifetime. It isn't even a close call, so for people who care about protecting liberty, there's never been - again, in my lifetime in Virginia - a statewide elected official who's been as aggressive and consistent about doing that as I have.

America is the moral force that defeated communism and all those who would put the human soul itself into bondage.

I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.

The liberties of a people depend on their own constant attention to its preservation.

Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control.

We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal ... that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

Freedom is on the march in this world. I believe everybody in the Middle East desires to live in freedom. I believe women in the Middle East want to live in a free society. I believe mothers and fathers want to raise their children in a free and peaceful world. I believe all these things, because freedom is not America's gift to the world, freedom is the almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world.

To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.

If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free.

We learn that Comrade [President of South Africa Nelson] Mandela has announced in a speech that he hopes for a bright future in South Africa for ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ Anyone who has thought about it realizes that liberty and equality are antithetical concepts. You can have one, or you can have the other, but you certainly cannot have both. As to that, either concept is a rather futile goal. Equality is biologically impossible, and liberty is only obtainable in homogeneous populations very thinly spread.

No person that has enjoyed the sweets of liberty can be insensible of its infinite value, or can reflect on its reverse without horror and detestation

Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatens, quacks, and hustlers.

If there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.