"Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community
is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation." -- John Quincy Adams.

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities." -- Alan Bloom.

"Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds." -- Pearl S. Buck.

"A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas." -- Henry Steele Commager.

"The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force." -- Max Eastman.

"While it is true that an inherently free and scrupulous person may be destroyed, such an individual can never be enslaved or used as a blind tool." -- Albert Einstein.

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." -- Albert Einstein.

"For what avail the plow or sail;

Or land or life, if freedom fail?" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security." -- Benjamin Franklin.

"Freedom lies in being bold." -- Robert Frost.

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it." -- William Faulkner.

"Lose this day loitering
'Twill be the same old story,
Tomorrow and the next,
Even more dilatory.
Whatever you would do,
Or dream of doing, begin it!
Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it.
Begin it now." -- Goethe.

"Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress
so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations." -- B.H. Liddell Hart.

"The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are." -- Friedrich Hayek.

"Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse." -- Eric Hoffer.

"Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay." -- Eric Hoffer.

"The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest." -- Charles Evans Hughes.

"That government is best which governs the least." -- Thomas Jefferson.

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending to too much liberty than those attending to too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson.

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us." -- Franz Kafka.

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -- Rudyard Kipling.

"Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies." -- D.H. Lawrence.

"The dagger plunged in the name of Freedom is plunged into the breast of Freedom." -- Jose Marti.

"Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them." -- John Stuart Mill.

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." -- George Orwell.

"I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it." -- Thomas Paine.

"Individuality is freedom lived." -- John Dos Passos.

"If you protect a man from folly, you will have a nation of fools." -- William Penn.

"The truth is found when men are free to pursue it." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships." -- Andrei Sakharov.

"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations." -- Adam Smith.

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force." -- George Washington.