“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”
More from Thomas Jefferson on Freedom
“no people can be both ignorant and free.”
“No people who are ignorant can be truly free.”
“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
“That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798)”
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.”
“The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrant. It is its natural manure.”
“Enlighten the people, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
Others on Freedom
Nelson Mandela
8 quotes“Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.”
Eisenhower
7 quotes“I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them ha...”
Epictetus
7 quotes“Freedom is not archived by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.”
James Madison
6 quotes“Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.”
Malcolm X
6 quotes“You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”
Thomas Paine
6 quotes“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
Frederick Douglass
6 quotes“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
6 quotes“To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.”
Spinoza
6 quotes“Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.”
John Milton
5 quotes“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5 quotes“When you have robbed a man of everything he is no longer in your power. He is free again.”
Cicero
5 quotes“Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.”