Abuse of Liberty Quotes

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.

What have the Germans gained by their boasted freedom of the press, except the liberty of abusing each other as they like?

Make no laws whatsoever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech will be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license;" and they will define and define freedom out of existence.

Every person may freely speak, write, and publish on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty; and in all trials for libel, both civil and criminal, the truth, when published with good motives and for justifiable ends, shall be a sufficient defense

Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it.

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.

The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.