If your object is to secure liberty, you must learn to do without authority and compulsion.
Independence Day Quotes
Despite the name, this is not a page about the American Fourth of July. It is built from the freedom and patriotism pages, and the writers who turn up come from all over: the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, the Italian anarchist Bruno Filippi, Shakespeare, Anna Quindlen. De Burgos has a line about an invaded nation where today’s battlefield is independence.
A few entries are there because of a keyword, not a mood. Cervantes’s remark about not thrusting his nose into other men’s porridge (Don Quixote, 1605) is about minding your own business. If you want something for a speech, sort by source grade and skip the oddities.
Most quoted on independence day:
Enforcing equality to compensate for the monstrous unfairness of nature destroys liberty.
The state is not the source of religious liberty, although it should acknowledge and protect it.
What do I believe? As an American I believe in generosity, in liberty, in the rights of man.
Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving.