Freedom - christiansquoting.org.uk

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. - Article 18, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

For those who fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know. --graffiti seen in Vietnam, then on bumper stickers and many other places since then.

In every age its [liberty's] progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food."--Lord Acton

The numbers of men in all ages have preferred ease, slumber, and good cheer to liberty, when they have been in competition. We must not then depend alone upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for it preservation. Some political institutions must be prepared to assist this love against its enemies. Without these, the struggle will ever end only in a change of imposters.--John Adams, letter to Samuel Adams, October 18, 1790

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
John Adams_Letters to his Wife : Vol. II_Letter #78, 1780

There is no better measure of a person than what he does when he is absolutely free to choose. --Wilma Askinas

We are as free as and free in exactly the sense that our neuronal processes are free. -- Stephen Boydstun

Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free. Patrick Buchanan

Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to thier disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity. E Burke in F A Hayek, The Fatal Conceit.

Christian freedom, in my opinion, consists of three parts. The first: that the consciences of believers, in seeking assurance of their justification before God, should rise above and advance beyond the law, forgetting all law righteousness...
The second part, dependent upon the first, is that consciences observe the law, not as if constrained by the necessity of the law, but that freed from the law's yoke they willingly obey God's will... The third part of Christian freedom lies in this: regarding outward things that are of themselves "indifferent", we are not bound before God by any religious obligation preventing us from sometimes using them and other times not using them, indifferently... Accordingly, it is perversely interpreted both by those who allege it as an excuse for their desires that they may abuse God's good gifts to their own lust and by those who think that freedom does not exist unless it is used before men, and consequently, in using it have no regard for weaker brethren... Nothing is plainer than this rule: that we should use our freedom if it results in the edification of our neighbour, but if it does not help our neighbour, then we should forego it.
John Calvin (1509-1564) The Institutes of the Christian Religion

Few have defined what free will is, although it repeatedly occurs in the writings of all. Origen seems to have put forward a definition generally agreed upon among ecclesiastical writers when he said that it is a faculty of the reason to distinguish between good and evil, a faculty of the will to choose one or the other. Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance of grace; evil, when grace is absent. John Calvin (1509-1564), The Institutes of the Christian Religion

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse fate. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.-- Winston Churchill on the eve of Britain's entry into World War II.

Cromwell ...was willing to allow a much greater diversity of religious forms to exist than any other seventeenth century English government before or after him. For Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, who were to be so savagely persecuted after 1660, Cromwellian England was a haven of religious freedom. Barry Coward, Cromwell, Longman 1991, p 111

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions. Stephen Covey

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.
Cowper, The Task

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 suppositin that he may abuse it.
Oliver Cromwell,letter to Walter Dundas, 12 Sept. 1650.

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. -- John Philpot Curran, 1750 - 1817

To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. Robyn Davidson

Freedom baby is never having to say you are sorry. -- John Milton aka Satan, in Devil's Advocate 1997

In my youth I stressed freedom; in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order. Will Durant

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way. Will Durant _The Lessons of History_

The foolish and the uneducated have little use for freedom. Only the educated are free. Epictetus

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.- Victor Frankl

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin. 1706-1790. Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. Benjamin Franklin

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.--- Robert Lee Frost

Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.--Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia

If we are bound to forgive an enemy, we are not bound to trust him. --Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -- Goethe (1749-1832)

Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves. --Hugo Grotius (1583-1645)

Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself. -- Alexander Hamilton

What we have called the "British tradition" was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Condorcet, are the best-known representatives........The sweeping success of the political doctrines that stem from the French tradition is probably due to their great appeal to human pride and ambition. But we must not forget that the political conclusions of the two schools derive from different conceptions of how society works. In this respect the British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the rationalist school was simply and completely wrong. --Friedrich A. Hayek _The Constitution of Liberty_

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. . . Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
Friedrich August Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as DeTocqueville describes it, "a new form of servitude. --F.A. Hayek

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice. --F.A. Hayek

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. -- F.A. Hayek

Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. Patrick Henry

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet to be purchased at the price of slavery and chains? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!! Patrick Henry

Our professed love of freedom is increasingly shown to be a sophistry that replaces wisdom and righteousness with self-gratification. Carl Henry

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. -- Frank Herbert.

Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely- Getrude Himmelfarb

There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavour, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland. Adolf Hitler

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Eric Hoffer

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. -- Eric Hoffer

The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned liberal compact majority.--Ibsen

Christianity promises to make men free; it never promises to make them independent. ~Wm Ralph Inge

If you had to describe the century's geopolitics in one sentence, it could be a short one: Freedom won. Free minds and free markets prevailed over fascism and communism.--Walter Isaacson, "Person of the Century: Who Mattered and Why," in the December 31 TIME

Find me the men on earth who care
Enough for faith or creed today
To seek the barren wilderness
For simple liberty to pray.
Helen Fiske Hunt Jackson,"The Pilgrim Forefathers" (1880)

What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate. And I do believe that if the Almighty has not decreed that man shall never be free (and it is blasphemy to believe it), that the secret will be found to be in the making himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence by a synthetical process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more oligarchical. --Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph C. Cabell (1816) ME 14:421

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to A. Stuart (1791)

The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good. -- Thomas Jefferson

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in afeather bed. Thomas Jefferson

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.Thomas Jefferson

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave. Thomas Jefferson

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. Thomas Jefferson

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Thomas Jefferson

The liberty of the press is a blessing when we are inclined to write against others, and a calamity when we find ourselves overborn by the multitude of our assailants.--Dr. Johnson

The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Freedom is in danger precisely when citizens lack pride and the state lacks bounds. - Abraham Kuyper, Christianity and the Class Struggle

In the last six years there has been an all but unseen revolution in our jurisprudence. Six hundred years of common and statute law, the law that has defined and upheld our liberty, has been subjected to the unpremeditated effects of the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights, through the Human Rights Act and its sequel &endash; the de facto incorporation of a suite of international treaties signed by prerogative power. The interaction of this quiet revolution with the other revolutionary development &endash; of European law &endash; has begun to pose fundamental questions about the conceptual integrity of our legal system and about the relationship between our judiciary, our Parliament and our democracy.
Where once our freedoms were built up layer by layer through the subtle interpretation of the courts and the democratic deliberations of Parliament, they are now subject to the intricate overlay of treaty upon treaty, generality upon generality.
I fear that if we do not begin to act now, to re-establish a structure of constitutional law and a doctrine of rights consonant with our history, we may in the not too distant future find ourselves losing liberties that we presently enjoy.
I fear that, perhaps without the will of Parliament or people being expressed, we may find faith schools loosing the freedom to choose their pupils, orthodox synagogues being stripped of charitable status if they keep out female rabbis, mosques being fined if they employ only Muslims. And I wonder, if in ten years time, it will still be legal to proclaim Jesus Christ as the only way to heaven, a proposition from which I dissent but which I wish to preserve the right of others to utter.
There are other threats to our liberties: the European Arrest Warrant; a restricted right to trial by jury; an end to the double jeopardy rule. Everywhere I look, I see around me the evidence of a need to enshrine our liberties, to delineate and protect the independence of our judiciary, to set out in some perspicuous form the constitutional relationships that protect us from tyranny.
We may not yet appreciate the freedoms we have today, but we will do if they are taken away from us. We may not yet appreciate the history of tolerance and respect &endash; the history of agreeing to differ &endash; that we have forged in this country. But if we begin to see it crumble, we will long for its return.
Let us begin to prevent now the need for such nostalgia and such longings in time to come. Let us reaffirm and enshrine in a new and more robust form the substance of our most precious inheritance &endash; the inheritance of liberty under the rule of law.
And let us, in so doing, provide for the whole nation a means by which the many can become one without ceasing to be many. Let us build a nation that upholds the freedom of each community, so that in return each community may uphold the nation.
Oliver Letwin MP E pluribus unum - agreeing to differ http://www.conservatives.com/news/article.cfm?obj_id=58240

Free institutions are not the property of any majority. They do not confer upon majorities unlimited powers. The rights of the majority are limited rights. They are limited not only by the constitutional guarantees but by the moral principle implied in those guarantees. That principle is that men may not use the facilities of liberty to impair them. No man may invoke a right in order to destroy it.-- Walter Lippmann

A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone. ~ Martin Luther.

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) In "The Russian Revolution," by Paul Froelich, ch. 6, 1940, tr. 1961.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) "Prison notes," 1918; in "The Russian Revolution," ch. 6, 1922, tr 1961.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. -- Lord Macaulay

The Root of All Rebellion: It is because we are not near enough to Thee to partake of thy liberty that we want a liberty of our own different from thine. George MacDonald, _What's Mine's Mine_, Chapter 15, 3 vols, 1886

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. W. Somerset Maugham, _Strictly Personal_

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.--H.L. Mencken

I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding. Henry Louis Mencken

But what more oft, in nations grown corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty&emdash;
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty&emdash;
John Milton. (1608 -1674). Samson Agonistes

None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license which never hath more scope than under tyrants. John Milton, 1649

I form'd them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthral themselves.
John Milton. 1608-1674. Paradise Lost. Book III, 124 - 25

The essential characteristic of Western civilisation that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilisations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders. Ludwig von Mises

.[W]ealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent--not to say toddlerlike--idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums. -- P. J. O'Rourke

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell (Eric Blair), Introduction to Animal Farm (1945)

Our forgiving of others will not procure forgiveness for ourselves; but our not forgiving others proves that we ourselves are not forgiven. ... John Owen (1616-1683)

Those who expect to reap the blessings of liberty must undergo the fatigues of supporting it.--Thomas Paine

Though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.--Thomas Paine,The American Crisis, #1, December 23, 1776.

To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man. Alan Paton

No man is free who depends on his government for his sustenance, job, home, or hope. No constitution, no court, no law can save liberty when it dies in the hearts and minds of men. John Perkins

Power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten.-- Wendell Phillips

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. --William Pitt to the House of Commons (11/18/1783)

As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom. -- Reagan, "Tear Down This Wall" speech, West Berlin, June 12, 1987

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. Ronald Reagan

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.--Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) (Message on the 74th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, [September 22, 1936])

[L]iberty without virtue would be no blessing to us. Benjamin Rush

The world was to be freed from Christianity and feudalism; it was not to be free to become Christian and feudal again. This rigid form of liberty being established, no other form of liberty would be permitted. What the [French] Revolution was really making for... was liberty absolute and forever empty; liberty without foundations in nature or history, but resident in a sort of prophetic commotion. Custom, law, privilege, and religion were not to command allegiance, but to be themes only for criticism and invective. Hence the mortal hatred of any view that recognized realities, or built upon them. --George Santayana _Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society and Government_ (1951)

We find freedom when we find God; we lose it when we lose Him. -- Paul Scherer

No man is free who is a slave to the flesh.--Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD)_Epistolae Ad Lucilium_, XCII

Liberty means responsibility. That's why most men dread it. G. B. Shaw "Maxims for Revolutionists"

[I]f vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established. Algernon Sidney

[L]iberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted . Algernon Sidney

Freedom is like a coin. It has the word privilege on one side and responsibility on the other. It does not have privilege on both sides. There are too many today who want everything involved in privilege but refuse to accept anything that approaches the sense of responsibility. -- Joseph Sizoo

Private property, not democracy, is the great guarantor of prosperity and liberty. And because it decentralizes power, it safeguards us from madmen with utopian hallucinations.--Thomas Sowell

A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. Adlai Stevenson

Freedom of the press... is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.~R.S. Surtees

The proverb warns that "You should not bite the hand that feeds you." But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself. Thomas Szasz

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered. Dorothy Thompson

They who are in highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are most observed. --John Tillotson (1630-1694), _Reflections_

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.--Alexis de Tocqueville,_Democracy in America_ (1835)

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. Alexis de Tocqueville

When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle. -- Louis Veuillot

Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow...-- Ludwig von Mises

The essential characteristic of Western civilisation that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilisations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders. Ludwig von Mises

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
Daniel Webster. 1782-1852. Speech at the Charleston Bar Dinner, May 10, 1847. From Webster's Works. Boston. 1857. Vol. ii. p. 393.

God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
Daniel Webster. 1782-1852. Speech, June 3, 1834. From Webster's Works. Boston. 1857. Vol. iv. p. 47.

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. ~ William Allen White, 1940

Liberty never came from government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. Woodrow Wilson Speech in New York, September 9, 1912

By the same token we are free when our lives are uncommitted, but not to be what we were intended to be. Real freedom is not freedom FROM, but freedom FOR. -- Robert W. Young