'Negative liberty' is a political science term meaning a liberty from government action. It is not a liberty to anything - like the liberty to meaningfully contribute to public debate or to have ample spaces for speech.
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.
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.
Liberty is always freedom from the government.
Liberty is a virgin whose veil it is not lawful to lift
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
You simply cannot continue a nation as America without that Christian base of liberty.
I prefer a positive view of freedom, drawing on another tradition of political thinking that goes all the way back to the ancient Greek polis.
Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.
Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.
America, my friends, is the only country in the world actually founded on liberty - the only one. People went to America to be free.
The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .
Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.
I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or 'convulsive' beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty
It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.
The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.
How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!
To the medieval mind a liberty was a right to the enjoyment of a specific property It was a freedom to do something with one's own without interference by the king or any other man.
The soul of liberty is love of law.
The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory.
Liberty sustains the same relation to mind that space does to matter.
We've got to get back to a sense of an American identity, and that identity is not nationality or religion or ethnicity. It is a particular idea, and that idea is that you should live in liberty and you should be able to pursue happiness.
