42 Quotes About Liberty

However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts.

If God gives you rights, no man and no government can take them away from you.

On the essentials, unity. On the nonessentials, liberty. In everything, charity.

God must speak to us before we have any liberty to speak to him. He must disclose to us who he is before we can offer him what we are in acceptable worship. The worship of God is always a response to the Word of God. Scripture wonderfully directs and enriches our worship.

We must face the fact that many today are notoriously careless in their living. This attitude finds its way into the church. We have liberty, we have money, we live in comparative luxury. As a result, discipline practically has disappeared. What would a violin solo sound like if the strings on the musician's instrument were all hanging loose, not stretched tight, not "disciplined"?

We must preserve our moral foundation and the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as gifts of God. Then we need to demand that anyone who wishes to represent us do the same.

It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.

Wherever God pardons sin, he subdues it... If the fetters of sin be broken off, and we walk at liberty in the ways of God, this is a blessed sign we are pardoned.

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This, within certain limits, is probably true. But in governments of a popular character, and purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent it bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.

Nothing harms or destroys us but the wrong use of that liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.

If we mean to support the liberty and independence which have cost us so much blood and treasure to establish, we must drive far away the demon of party spirit and local reproach.

How does it secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity, to those generations yet unborn, to kill them, aborting them in the womb?

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, under no form of government are laws better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.

But the soul renounced shall abide in the boundlessness of God's life. This is liberty, this is prosperity. The more we lose, the more we gain.

I dare not exercise personal liberty if it infringes on the liberty of others.

Christian liberty then does not teach that there are things in the world in which you are free to indulge yourself. It does not suggest that you may do anything you wish with God's creation. But it teaches that there are things which you are free to enjoy and use as you serve the Lord.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

A principle is one thing; a maxim or rule is another. A principle requires liberality; a rule says, "one tenth." A principle says, "forgive"; a rule defines "seven times."

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.

How does it secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity, to those generations yet unborn, to kill them, aborting them in the womb?

Interwoven is the love of liberty with every ligament of the heart.

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.

There is something childish and legalistic about churches in which all of the saints observe precisely the same standards. When all lives begin to sink into the same mould of denial and exercise of liberty, something is amiss.

God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.

It is the greatest and dearest blessing that ever God gave to men, that they may repent; and therefore to deny or to delay it is to refuse health when brought by the skill of the physician - to refuse liberty offered to us by our gracious Lord.

Only what God has commanded in His word should be regarded as binding; in all else there may be liberty of actions.

Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth.

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.

The moment any mention is made of Christian liberty lust begins to boil, or insane commotions arise, if a speedy restraint is not laid on those licentious spirits by whom the best things are perverted into the worst.

Wherefore, though the Christian, as a Christian, is the only man at liberty, as called thereunto of God; yet his liberty is limited to things that are good: he is not licensed thereby to indulge the flesh.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes - whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought.

Beware of fatiguing them by ill-judged exactness. If virtue offers itself to the child under a melancholy and constrained aspect, while liberty and license present themselves under an agreeable form, all is lost, and your labor is in vain.

Personal liberty is not personal license.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Liberty may be an instrument for giving glory to the Most High, or it may be a curtain used to shield base indulgence of the flesh (I Peter 2:16). You may discover by self-examination of your heart which function liberty serves in your life.

The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.