No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

This young century will be liberty’s century.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

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.

True liberal government is founded on the emancipation of men.

We are a nation founded as a rebuke to tyranny. A nation of revolutionaries who refused sovereign reign from afar. Hear me – we’re a nation that says give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A nation built on our differences, guided by the belief that we’re all created equal.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

It takes tremendous discipline to control the influence, the power you have over other people’s lives.

Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I’ve had a lot of experience with that.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

It’s hard to be humble, when you’re as great as I am.

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves nor their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.

Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.

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

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

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.

I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.

A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

Freedom does not die from frontal attack. It dies because men in power no longer believe in a system based upon liberty.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

Everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.

To deal with individual human needs at the everyday level can be noble sometimes.

The devil ain’t got no power over me. The devil come, and me shake hands with the devil. Devil have his part to play. Devil’s a good friend, too… because when you don’t know him, that’s the time he can mosh you down.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change.

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

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

People are terrified of me, and I want them to be.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.

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

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

All of us are in the same place, each with our own rooms, and we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. Which is totally different than college, where they manage your schedule for you. In the NBA, you’re on your own.