#liberty

Sweetest of all is liberty. This we have chosen and this we pay for. We have embraced the laws of Lykurgus, and they are stern laws. They have schooled us to scorn the life of leisure, which this rich land of ours would bestow upon us if we wished, and instead to enroll ourselves in the academy of discipline and sacrifice. Guided by these laws, our fathers for twenty generations have breathed the blessed air of freedom and have paid the bill in full when it was presented. We, their sons, can do no less. ↗

— Steven Pressfield

#liberty #sacrifice #warrior #warrior-ethos #freedom

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#liberty #morals #rights #age

I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ↗

— Victoria Woodhull

#come #declare #entitled #happiness #i

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

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country. ↗

— Marquis de Lafayette

#country #humanity #liberty #now #won

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

Our nation stands at the crossroads of liberty. Crushing national debt, rampant illegal immigration, insane business regulations and staggering national unemployment are pushing our nation into unchartered territory. ↗

— James Lankford

#crossroads #crushing #debt #illegal #illegal immigration

To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. ↗

— Richard Henry Lee

#always #arms #body #especially #essential