Happy Independence Day

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1801

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
-- Rosa Luxemburg

The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.
-- Carl Friedrich Bahrdt

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
-- Victor Hugo

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.
-- Hubert Humphrey

To preserve the freedom of the human mind … and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think the condition of man will proceed in improvement. The generation which is going off the stage has deserved well of mankind for the struggles it has made, and for having arrested the course of despotism which had overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years. If there seems to be danger that the ground they have gained will be lost again, that danger comes from the generation your contemporary. But that the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and country.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1799

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
-- Thomas Jefferson

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
-- Mark Twain

... a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.
-- Mark Twain

God grant, that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth, so that a Philosopher may set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, “This is my Country.”
-- Benjamin Franklin

Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.
-- Benjamin Franklin

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
-- Response attributed to B. Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention

What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements ... might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.
-- Benjamin Franklin