Freedom

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until the other is ready.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

Do not reveal, if liberty is precious to you; my face is the prison of love.

The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonizing about alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must.

Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak .

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court?

Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather.

I [Ariel] will be correspondent to command, And do my spiriting gently.

The mountain nymph, sweet liberty.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth the compass round, And only by one’s going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

I am as free as nature first made man,

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Habit, n . A shackle for the free.

Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.