People

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America is one of the greatest if not the greatest of social experiments in history. As individuals we value our freedom and historically as a nation we valued freedom so much that we fought England for the right to be free from our mother country which tried to enslave us both economically and religiously.

Not all nations have valued freedom like America. In fact as we look across the pages of history you'll find that power is the greatest political quest and ambition of nations but in terms of the individual it has been liberty and freedom that captures our highest desires.

Our challenges are rooted in systemic corruption that involves both major political parties. Some of the most damaging laws on today’s books — such as those allowing civil asset forfeiture, NSA spying, police militarization, abuse of U.S. taxpayers and so on — are backed by a majority of both parties. Focusing on removing President Obama as if it would solve these problems is a distraction.

Most importantly, in my view true personal sovereignty is a misnomer because historically the term sovereign referred only to God who alone is omnipotent ruler of the universe totally independent and self-sufficient.

All three branches of government, and the electoral process itself, have been seriously damaged over the last generation, and change is unlikely until the sources of that damage are addressed.

With these things in mind I thought it would be beneficial to look at what some of the prominent men and women in history have had to say about freedom and liberty.

It can be very instructive to look to the wisdom of the past even if some of those voices were not conscientiously Christian. Nevertheless, truth is truth wherever it is found and we must see the wisdom of God in all truth for there is no truth but that which is found in the all wise and all knowing Lord of Creation.

First for some inspired words from the Holy Spirit as found in holy scripture:

Isaiah 61:1 - The Spirit of the Lord GOD [is] upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to [them that are] bound;


John 8:32 - And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.


Galatians 5:1 - Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.


2 Corinthians 3:17 - Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord [is], there [is] liberty.

Romans 6:18 - Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.

Romans 8:2 "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death."








“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica

“It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”
― Horace Greeley


“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, and Early Writings


“I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.


“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.



“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
― Thomas Jefferson


“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


“Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
― John Locke, Second Treatise of Government



“When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics


“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin


“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
― Mahatma Gandhi


“There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.”
― Tobias Wolff


“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
― Ronald Reagan


“Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see. ”
― Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot


“. . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson


“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.

When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America


“Riches I hold in light esteem,
And love I laugh to scorn,
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn.

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!'

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
'Tis all that I implore -
In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.”
― Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems


“It’s hard to steal somebody’s shoes while they are wearing them and not have them notice. But that’s what politicians have done in this country. Not only that, but they replaced all our footwear with concrete boots.
”
― Jarod Kintz


“Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.”
― Noah Webster


“But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.”
― Edmund Burke


“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”
― Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the news


“The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.”


“The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
― James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison


“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

[The One Un-American Act, Speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York, on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award (December 3, 1952)]”
― William O. Douglas


“There are some who are still weak in faith, who ought to be instructed, and who would gladly believe as we do. But their ignorance prevents them...we must bear patiently with these people and not use our liberty; since it brings to peril or harm to body or soul...but if we use our liberty unnecessarily, and deliberately cause offense to our neighbor, we drive away the very one who in time would come to our faith. Thus St. Paul circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3) because simple minded Jews had taken offense; he thought: what harm can it do, since they are offended because of ignorance? But when, in Antioch, they insisted that he out and must circumcise Titus (Gal. 2:3) Paul withstood them all and to spite them refused to have Titus circumcised... He did the same when St. Peter...it happened in this way: when Peter was with the Gentiles he ate pork and sausages with them, but when the Jews came in, he abstained from this food and did not eat as he did before. Then the Gentiles who had become Christians though: Alas! we, too, must be like the Jews, eat no pork, and live according to the law of Moses. But when Paul learned that they were acting to the injury of evangelical freedom, he reproved Peter publicly and read him an apostolic lecture, saying: "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (Gal. 2:14). Thus we, too, should order our lives and use our liberty at the proper time, so that Christian liberty may suffer no injury, and no offense be given to our weak brothers and sisters who are still without the knowledge of this liberty.”
― Martin Luther


“And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time.”
― Ron Paul, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom


“Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the future. He simply calls it the American way of life and does not give serious thought to the question of what made this continuous improvement in the supply of material goods possible.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Economic Freedom and Interventionism


“Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law


"Liberty can only exist where there is moral excellence. Diminish or take away that moral excellence and liberty is on a slippery slope into oblivion."
-Carlton D. Pruitt, Writer, Musician and Street Preacher








Carlton Pruitt ministers the gospel to the Los Angeles area.
Formerly a Hollywood actor (SAG member) and junk removal expert he now spends most of his time studying the scriptures, writing articles, hymns and poems and doing street preaching.

See all his videos on https://www.YouTube.com/user/LAStreetPreacher

CONTACT at [email protected]

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