Liberty

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.

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

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

a just recompence for our sacrifice of that universal liberty of action, common to all sensible beings, and only limited by our natural powers.

but must be particularly acceptable to the English, from the eloquent and forcible manner in which the author pleads the cause of liberty, benevolence and humanity.

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;

also that ambassadors be sent to the other Greeks, but first of all to the Thebans, because Philip is nearest to their territory, and exhort them not to be dismayed at Philip, but to hold fast to their own liberty and the liberty of the other Greeks, assuring them t hat the people of Athens, harboring no ill will for previous mutual differences between the states, will help them with troops, money …

There is no man living, whether Greek or barbarian, who does not know that the Thebans, or the Lacedaemonians, who held supremacy before them, or the king of Persia himself, would cheerfully and gratefully have given Athens liberty to keep what she had and to take what she chose, if only she would do their behest and surrender the primacy of Greece.

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.

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;

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 …

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

with oligarchies you fight for none of these things, but for your constitution and your liberty.

Now, all other wrongdoers must be considered the enemies of those only whom they have wronged, but when men overthrow free constitutions and change them to oligarchies, I urge you to regard them as the common enemies of all who love freedom.

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

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.

There was something, men of Athens, something which animated the mass of the Greeks but which is lacking now, something which triumphed over the wealth of Persia, which upheld the liberties of Hellas, which never lost a single battle by sea or land, something the decay of which has ruined everything and brought our affairs to a state of chaos.

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.

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.

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

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.

Liberty is incorporeal.

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.

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

The eternal law has done nothing better than that it gave us one entrance into life, but many exits.

the road to that great liberty is opened with a lancet, and security stands fast in a tiny prick.

the good fortune of a whole and sound body has never demanded the trial of this virtue from us.

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;