Liberty

Is the welfare of the race bound up with the freedom or with the slavery of the Individual?

All these well-meant laws interfering with the freedom of adults to choose their own habits of life are fraught with danger.

It consists of all those moral or “natural” rights which have not been taken away for the general good, and all those civil rights which have been conferred upon him by the State in exchange for the rights of which he has been deprived.

No man ever gave up his liberty merely for the good of the public.

Thus it was necessity that forced men to give up a part of their liberty;

Hence it follows, that in extreme political liberty, and in absolute despotism, all ideas of honour disappear, or are confounded with others.

Therefore now also the people of Athens will not desert the cause of Thebes and the other Greeks.

you cannot, men of Athens, you cannot have done wrongly when you accepted the risks of war for the redemption and the liberties of mankind;

But then, if Athens, after claiming the primacy of the nations, had run away from her claims, she would have been held guilty of betraying Greece to Philip.

He, however, thought that the city was not in a settled state, and that the people would not so immediately give up their ancient liberty, nor remain quiet, if they should see a large force of Lacedaemonians;

but about two months after his departure the Thasians began to fortify their city, as wanting no more aristocracy in conjunction with the Athenians, but daily looking for liberty to be given them by the Lacedaemonians.

and now also they would be brought to such a strait, should they not consent to give them back the government, that they themselves would be better able to exclude them from the sea than to be excluded from it by them.

…[if] there is any power, let it claim itself into liberty.

For after the disasters to the Greek forces at Chaeroneia, when the very foundations of our State were threatened with the utmost danger, when Hypereides proposed that the disfranchised citizens should be reinstated in order that, if any such danger should menace our State, all classes might unite wholeheartedly in the struggle for liberty, the defendant indicted this decree as unconstitutional an …

In my opinion it is right to restore the Rhodian democracy;

The Greeks have two treaties with the King, one made by our city and commended by all;

and it will be in your power, if you are accepted as the common champions of Greek liberty.

for even if all other states succumb to slavery, we surely must fight the battle of liberty.

The explanation is the same as at Athens, that the patriots, however much they desire it, cannot sometimes say anything agreeable, for they are obliged to consider the safety of the state;

But at Oreus Philistides, Menippus, Socrates, Thoas, and Agapaeus, the very men who now control the city, were, as everyone knew, Philip’s agents, but Euphraeus, a man who once resided here at Athens, was working for the freedom and emancipation of his countrymen.

This was enacted by the Twelve Tables in favour of liberty, in order that the vindex or assertor of liberty might never be deterred by the magnitude of the risk.

The vindex (the word is like vindicatio and vindiciae derived from vim dicere) was in an analogous position to the assertor libertatis, since a person who was himself the object of a suit could not himself be defendant in it.

President Adams has somewhere said, I believe, that liberty consisted in an equality of laws.

Political liberty is liberty for the weaker party in a nation.

It is this power of vetoing all partial and oppressive legislation, and of restricting the government to the maintenance of such laws as the whole, or substantially the whole, people are agreed in, that makes the trial by jury “the palladium of liberty.

Liberty is incorporeal.

And the nature of men assures us, that there was never a time known among them, when the injury or destruction of various kinds of incorporeal property, as, for example, strength, sight, health, beauty, liberty, and life, was not considered and treated as a wrong to be avenged.

And so all things everywhere are just bursting with the spirit of liberty.

Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly,it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs.

This was to do an insult to death.

Do you wish to be free against this body?

This is the one thing for which we cannot complain of life:

If, then, you would be in his good graces, you must try to find out what sort of knowledge it was that made Themistocles able to give Greece liberty;