Everyone needs to stop and breathe and look at how redefining marriage will have a hugely chilling effect on religious liberty in America.
Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.
You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
Only the checks put upon magistrates (government officials) make nations free; and only the want of such checks make them slaves. They are free, where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by the people … And they are slaves, where the magistrates choose their own rules … and therefore most nations in the world are undone, and those nations only who bridle their governors do not wear chains
Although the author was unknown, Cato had a following and his material was very influential.
The freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.
Where licentiousness begins, liberty ends.
Man's liberty ends, and it ought to end, when that liberty becomes the curse of its neighbors.
Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
It is impossible to maintain freedom and order and justice without religious and moral sanctions.
There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.
Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lone lines.
Liberty never meant the license to do anything at will.
What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.
I enjoy the freedom of modern dance as well as the constraints of classical dance.
Each side takes the position of the man who was arrested for swinging his arms and hitting another in the nose, and asked the judge if he did not have a right to swing his arms in a free country. 'Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.
There ought to be limits to freedom. We're aware of the site, and this guy is just a garbage man.
Freedom has ceased to be a birthright; it has come to mean whatever we are still permitted to do.
The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.
No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
For now realize that you can change anything you want, but you can't change everything you want.
Women are enslaved by their own liberation.
The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is. It is my opinion that we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels in the Church.