#libert

It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren. ↗

— Sandra Day O'Connor

#difficult #discern #liberty #religious #religious liberty

It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust. ↗

— Barack Obama

#attacked #behind #cherish #day #down

History has taught us over and over again that freedom is not free. When push comes to shove, the ultimate protectors of freedom and liberty are the brave men and women in our armed forces. Throughout our history, they've answered the call in bravery and sacrifice. ↗

— Tim Pawlenty

#answered #armed #armed forces #brave #brave men

True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will. ↗

— Jonathan Edwards

#consists #constrained #doing #liberty #only

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody. ↗

— Washington Irving

#imagination #liberty #poet #thought #imagination

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#philosophy #society #tyranny #life

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#drugs #liberty #privacy #urinalysis #war-on-drugs

The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. ↗

— James Madison

#liberalism #liberty #tyranny #roman

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#eyes #had #hanging #i #indiscriminately

China has to go along with world trends. That's democracy, liberty, individual freedom. China sooner or later has to go that way. It cannot go backward. ↗

— Dalai Lama

#backward #cannot #china #democracy #freedom