link to original reddit post by /u/ihaphleas
I'm going to start collecting some *short* quotes/aphorisms/etc. here. Some of these could even be half illustrated.
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." -- Oscar Wilde
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- George Orwell
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” --Henry David Thoreau
"I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest." --Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
"People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take." --Emma Goldman
“I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
“This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.” ― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child
“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
“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!” ― Patrick Henry
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” ― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” ― John Milton , Areopagitica
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” ― Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood / The Busy-Body / Early Writings
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” ― John Philpot Curran
“A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” ― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” ― Samuel Adams
“Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.” ― John F. Kennedy
“A right delayed is a right denied.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.” ― Thomas Jefferson
“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. (1778 - 1830)” ― William Hazlitt
“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” ― John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, The History of Freedom
"No rulers doesn't mean no rules." -- ihaphleas
“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt,
And by thir vices brought to servitude,
Than to love Bondage more than Liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty;”
― John Milton, Samson Agonistes
“The securest place is a prison cell, but there is no liberty”
― Ben Franklin (good for an illustration)
“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
“The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.”
― Christopher Hitchens