Topic: Freedom, Matches 23 quotes.

Grateful For Our Country

I am grateful, also, as I return to this country, for our country itself. I am grateful for its territorial aloofness from the rest of the world. Even with the most modern, destructive weapons of war, we are almost immune. I am grateful for our political international aloofness and I pray our Heavenly Father that we shall never lose the security which comes from minding our own business and remaining aloof from the quarrels and the pettiness of the politics of the world.

I am grateful for our economic sufficiency that we can, within our own borders, produce all that we need for our daily lives, and the most of what we need for our luxury. The need of other great powers for this sufficiency threatens to bring sometime in the future another devastating struggle.

I am grateful to my Heavenly Father for our free institutions, for the liberty which we have, the freedom of the press, the freedom of religion, freedom to do as we wish within the law. I am grateful that the great principle behind our system of government is that we may do anything which the law does not forbid. There are other systems in the world in which the individual may do that only which the law permits, and between those two great principles lies the difference between freedom and slavery. I am grateful for this, my brethren and sisters, far beyond my power to tell.

Source: President J. Reuben Clark, Jr.
General Conference, October 1937

Topics: Freedom; Politics, International

When the government of the United States was finally organized under the God-inspired Constitution, it was the result of toil and blood; and faith in the providences of God. The age- long barriers of class were done away with, and those founders declared that here in this nation, there should be no slave; there should be no king; nor master; nor subject. The fathers of the republic said to us: “We are all children of God, free and equal.”

Source: Elder Levi Edgar Young
General Conference, October 1936

Topics: Freedom

What is freedom? What is liberty? Does it mean license to do evil? No, indeed it does not. To be free means to liberate ourselves from the bondage of sin. We, in this country, boast of our human liberty and we have great reason to be proud of the liberty that we enjoy under our Constitution; but after all is said and done it is only a measure of civil liberty, but the greatest measure to be found among all the governments of the world. We sometimes boast of being in the land of the free, the home of the brave. Nevertheless, we are not free until we have overcome evil—until we liberate ourselves from the bondage of sin.

Source: Elder Rulon S. Wells
General Conference, April 1930

Topics: Freedom

Of all the individual rights which our forefathers handed down in their legacy to us, none perhaps has been greater nor more fruitful to our society than the traditional right of every American . . . to use and enjoy his individual freedom; and the incentive to develop to the highest possible degree his personal creative talents.

Source: Irving S. Olds
The Thousand Miles of Lao-Tse

Topics: Freedom

This human liberty for which these mighty men, to whom I have alluded, have struggled, great and glorious though it is, is after all only a measure of civil liberty. There is a greater freedom to which we should aspire; for, let it be known that even in this great and glorious republic, the greatest one that ever existed upon the face of the earth, where the greatest measure of human liberty is meted out to our Father’s children, in this land of the free and home of the brave, we are not free. “The whole world lieth in sin and groaneth under darkness and under the bondage of sin,” but the truth that emanated from God, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, that was proclaimed in that primeval day shall make us free indeed if we will only receive and obey it.

Source: Elder Rulon S. Wells
General Conference, October 1926

Topics: Christianity; Freedom

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

Source: Milton Friedman

Topics: Free Market; Freedom

A society that puts equality . . . ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Source: Milton Friedman

Topics: Equality; Freedom

When I was in Hamburg, I had to go and get a permit to authorize me to stay one month, and when that was done, I had to get another to authorize me to stay another month. The only thing we can do in that country at present is to baptize some of the citizens, and set them to preaching, as they have more rights and privileges than a stranger. No man has a right to receive his own son into his own house, if not a citizen, without a card; or a permit from the Government; and that is a free city, so called. We cannot know anything about the blessings and privileges we have as Americans, without becoming acquainted with the condition of other nations, this is one of the greatest countries in the world, but they (the Americans) do not appreciate their privileges.

Source: John Taylor
Journal of Discourses, Vol.1, p.28, August 22, 1852

Topics: Freedom

Each town of early-day Utah was an ecclesiastical unit, with social and political tendencies. The ecclesiastical unit was based on the idea of individual power and self-development through religious principles. Each individual was responsible in this religious scheme to his God; each was independent to grow intellectually and morally in the sense that man is in the image of God. It is necessary to say this m order that we may understand the democracy of the town government of early-day Utah. Politically and socially, all rights were inherent in the people.

The power that held the people together was the religious feeling; and with this the economic interests common to all. In these social groups, the desire was to live and let live. The people were intensely practical; the physical conditions of the country made them so. They were compelled to apply their religious idealism to the immediate problems in hand.

The two ideals fundamental in traditional American thought are the ideal of individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for the resources of the country, and the ideal of democracy, where the government is for all the people and by all the people. American democracy has always been based on free lands. Such ideals were always present in the colonizing of the valleys of Utah. But we must not forget that the “Mormon” colonists were always religious in their organization in form as well as in purpose.

Source: Elder Levi Edgar Young
General Conference, April 1921

Topics: Freedom; Society

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