Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

For more than four decades, the Libyan people have been ruled by a tyrant – Moammar Gaddafi. He has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world – including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth’s treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.

We have always been prepared to negotiate with the U.S. government everything that has to do with bilateral relations, on a basis of the strictest mutual respect for the sovereign rights of each country. We will never try to ask the government of the United States to change its economic and political system.

I groan daily under a body of sin and corruption. Oh for the time when I shall drop this flesh, and be free from sin!

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

Fearlessness is not only possible, it is the ultimate joy. When you touch nonfear, you are free.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

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.

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Taste cannot be controlled by law.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren’t the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.

Although we resolutely supported the armed struggle against Batista’s tyranny, we were, on principle, opposed to any terrorist action that could cause the death of innocent people.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‚I know.‘ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

I think women want freedom. They want to be empowered. They want hope. They want love; they want all the things that I want, and I’m not afraid to say those things and act on them, and I think that’s why they identify with me.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free.

For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein’s regime is a better and safer place.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don’t belong anymore to anyone, that I’m not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

Each time we cooperate with God, we take one more giant step forward. Because when God asks us to change, it means that He always has something better to give us – more freedom, greater joy, and greater blessings.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

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

I believe in the transformational power of liberty. I believe that the free Iraq is in this nation’s interests. I believe a free Afghanistan is in this nation’s interest.

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.