Freedom isn't free
Freedom Isn't free
You got to pay the price
You got to sacrifice
For your liberty.

Up With People (1960s)

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” 1783

William Pitt the Younger

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Goethe

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. ~Thomas Paine

MLK, Tom Paine

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.

James Madison

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Sigmund Freud

"To those who have risked their lives for it, Freedom has a meaning that the protected will never know."

Written on a Ft Bragg barracks wall in 1978

The continued existence of capitalism requires the continued expansion of the sphere of freedom.
However capitalism requires that this expansion be geared towards a single end i.e. capital accumulation

Michel Foucault

"Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither."

Benjamin Franklin

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

E.B. White (1948)

We should never forget the freedoms that have been won by those who have gone before us.

Forget who, but not the quote

"The freedom to swing your arm ends where the other guy's nose begins."

Miss Daisey Griffiths, my high school social studies teacher

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

Kris Kristofferson

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.

Ayn Rand

Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.

Benjamin Franklin

h/t: Instapundit

I’m reminded of this quote from Robert Heinlein:

"Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort."

"Lazarus" - Main character of Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"

Protectionism is a misnomer. The only people protected by tariffs, quotas and trade restrictions are those engaged in uneconomic and wasteful activity. Free trade is the only philosophy compatible with international peace and prosperity.

Walter Block

Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.

Ron Paul

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

Thomas Sowell

If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his human right.

Murray N. Rothbard