True Liberty Quotes

Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing.

The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization.

True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us

True liberty does violence to self and, like Christ, who disregarded that he was sovereign becomes a slave to serve others.

If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of Philosophy.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.

There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty.

Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.

If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things to govern your soul and your senses . . . only through discipline may a man learn to be free.

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

A strong human spirit with control over appetites of the flesh is master over emotions and passions and not a slave to them. That kind of freedom is as vital to the spirit as oxygen is to the body! Freedom from self-slavery is true liberation!

This is true liberty, when free-born men, having to advise the public, may speak free.

We built [socialistic society] for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks.

And may I not be allowed to ... read in the character of the American people, in their devotion to true liberty and to the Constitution which is its palladium [protection], ... a Government which watches over ... the equal interdict [prohibition] against encroachments and compacts between religion and the state.

Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. No one can hinder him.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free – he is his own trap.

No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence.

It becomes all therefore who are friends of a Government based on free principles to reflect, that by denying the possibility of a system partly federal and partly consolidated, and who would convert ours into one either wholly federal or wholly consolidated, in neither of which forms have individual rights, public order, and external safety, been all duly maintained, they aim a deadly blow at the last hope of true liberty on the face of the Earth.

The Church must actualize, be present in the public debate, in our struggle for a true concept of liberty and peace.

Let them fear bondage who are slaves to fear; the sweetest freedom is an honest heart.

The world tells us in a thousand different ways that the bigger we become, the freer we will be. The richer, the more beautiful, and the more powerful we grow, the more security, liberty, and happiness we will experience. And yet, the gospel tells us just the opposite, that the smaller we become, the freer we will be.

Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a Nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by the arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class.

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.