"Civil liberty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... root of the matter! Not unfrightful it must have been; ludicro-terrific, and most unmanageable. At such hour the overwatched Three Hundred are not yet stirring: none but some Clerks, a company of National Guards; and M. de Gouvion, the Major-general. Gouvion has fought in America for the cause of civil Liberty; a man of no inconsiderable heart, but deficient in head. He is, for the moment, in his back apartment; assuaging Usher Maillard, the Bastille-serjeant, who has come, as too many do, with 'representations.' The assuagement is still ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... conscience with the formal acts of courtesy between man and man, was there. The spirit that took for its motto "You cannot shut up discord" was there. And out of these combined elements, trained in the school of thought that had treated as tyranny the religious and civil liberty of the United States, grew directly the Woman-Suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not a delegate. The delegates were Abby Kelly, Esther Moore, and Lucretia Mott. Mrs. Stanton was a bride, and in the immediate party on this, their wedding trip, was Mr. Birney, her husband's special ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... of national humiliation was mingled anxiety for civil liberty. Rumours, indistinct indeed, but perhaps the more alarming by reason of their indistinctness, imputed to the court a deliberate design against all the constitutional rights of Englishmen. It had even been ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the race is not by the destroying of intelligence, nor by denying the first principles of civil liberty, nor by crushing the aspirations for freedom, but by producing conditions that make the application of these principles and the exercise of freedom impossible. Though the race may increase in intelligence and ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... lived in the times of general confusion; he was engaged in the factions of state, and the cause he thought proper to espouse, he maintained with unshaken firmness; he struggled to the last for what he was persuaded were the rights of humanity; he had a passion for civil liberty, and he embarked in the support of it, heedless of every consideration of danger; he exposed his fortune to the vicissitudes of party contention, and he exerted his genius in writing for the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... hundred and tenth anniversary of the birth of Washington; we are met to celebrate this day. Washington is the mightiest name of earth, long since the mightiest in the cause of civil liberty, still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name no eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add to the brightness of the sun or glory to the name of Washington is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn awe we pronounce the name and, ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... "These rude, vehement orators, with their narrow, often erroneous, ideas, are nevertheless doing a good work. They are opening the minds of the ignorant, clearing a way for broader, higher ideals to lodge therein; they are the pioneers, in this hitherto undiscovered country for France, of civil liberty, and of freedom ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... our leaders do not exert the power of the British Empire in its full force, the struggle will be long, dubious, and disgraceful. We are past the hour of lenitives and half exertions." Early in 1776, Dr. Richard Price, the Dissenting preacher, issued his famous pamphlet on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War, which had a great run. Taking sides with the colonists, he said: "It is madness to resolve to butcher them. Freemen are not to be governed by force, or dragooned into compliance. If capable of bearing to be so treated, ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... arrested, could be condemned by summary process. The Lieutenant General of Police had it in his discretion to punish without publicity. The more scandalous crimes were systematically hidden from the public; a process more favorable to morality than to civil liberty. For the criminal classes in Paris arbitrary imprisonment was the common fate, and disreputable men and women Were brought in by bands.[Footnote: ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... of the army; and as a rebellion, in which the troops have been covered with decorations, and have received a gratification of some months' pay, is not the era from which we should wish to date the civil liberty and national prosperity of a monarchy founded by Great Britain, France, and Russia, we shall use great delicacy in describing the movement, and record no fact which we cannot substantiate by legal or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... always lay. The Camisard civil war which happened there, was not without its influence. The resolute spirit which it had evoked survived. The people were purified by suffering, and though they did not conquer civil liberty, they continued to live strong, hardy, virtuous lives. When Protestantism was at length able to lift up its head after so long a period of persecution, it was found that, during its long submergence, it had lost neither ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... of the freest country in the world? Why blame him for acting in harmony with the canons of every Christian church—aye, of that one of which I was a member, and proud of its history as a bulwark of civil liberty? Was it any fault of his that "all that she (the wife) can acquire by her labor-service or act during coverture, belongs to her husband?" Certainly not. Yet that law made me shrink and think of mother's warning, given so ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Supernaturalism of the eighteenth century, the other to a system of philosophical Deism. The reduced state of piety was largely due to the oppression suffered at the hand of the state. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which deprived Protestants of both religious and civil liberty, occurred in October, 1685, and it was not until 1808 that the law of the 18th Germinal once more recognized their rights, and placed Catholicism and Protestantism on an equal basis. The whole interval ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... but all will in the end fall upon the Spaniard!"[682] The prospect was not bright. Peace was yet far distant—peace, which Coligny preferred a thousand times to his own life, but would not purchase dishonorably by the sacrifice of civil liberty and of the right to worship his God according to the convictions of his heart and conscience. The burden of the defence of the Protestants had appeared sufficiently heavy when Conde, a prince of the blood, was alive to share it with him. But ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... southern brethren, whenever they may have occasion to come among us, all the privileges and immunities enjoyed by our own citizens, and all the rights and privileges guarantied to them by the Constitution of the United States; but they cannot expect of us to depart from the fundamental principles of civil liberty for the purpose of obviating any temporal inconvenience which they ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... fact that the grievances which led to that war were directly inflicted upon the Northern colonies. Those of the South had no material cause of complaint; but, actuated by sympathy for their Northern brethren, and a devotion to the principles of civil liberty and community independence, which they had inherited from their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and which were set forth in the Declaration of Independence, they made common cause with their neighbors, and may, at least, claim to have done their full ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... presented a beautiful banner of white satin, trimmed with gold fringe, on which was inscribed, "A Woman's Voting Hymn." The reverse side, of blue silk, contained the dedication: "To Peter Hill, Alderman of the Ninth Ward, Detroit. First to Register a Woman's Vote. By recognizing civil liberty and equality for woman, he has placed the last and brightest jewel ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... and the authorities who had imprisoned Moretz no longer ventured to proceed as they had before done. The peasants, oppressed for centuries by the owners of the soil, and treated like slaves, had long been groaning for the blessings of civil liberty. On several occasions they had revolted against their lords, but their rebellions had always been put down with bloodshed and fearful cruelties. Once more the same desire to emancipate themselves had sprung up in all parts of the country. This desire did not ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... is probably no one in the South who would advocate the reinstatement of that "peculiar institution," even if it could be effected by the lifting of a finger. "The cause we fought for and our brothers died for," says Professor Gildersleeve of Baltimore, "was the cause of civil liberty, not the cause of human slavery.... If the secrets of all hearts could have been revealed, our enemies would have been astounded to see how many thousands and tens of thousands in the Southern States felt the crushing burden and the awful responsibility of the institution which we were supposed ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... "Napoleon in Exile." He always stoutly maintained his claim to the suggestion of the "Percy Anecdotes." Phillips died in 1840. Superficial as he was, and commercial as were his literary aims, we nevertheless cannot refuse him the praise awarded in his epitaph:—"He advocated civil liberty, general benevolence, ascendancy of justice, and the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... on insanity, not only took them into our bosoms, but invited them to aid us in making our laws and electing our rulers. To ask men, the greater part of whom could neither read nor write, who were ignorant of the first principles of true civil liberty, who could be bought and sold like sheep in the shambles, to assist us in founding a model republic, was a folly without a parallel in the history of the world, and one of which we have not yet begun to pay the full penalty. It was a cruel wrong, not only to ourselves, but to the oppressed masses ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... front was Richard Henry Lee, the Cicero of that august assembly, and by his side sat the venerable John Witherspoon of Princeton College, the equally impressive and earnest preacher of the gospel of Christ and the gospel of civil liberty. Near the President's chair sat the attenuated, white-haired secretary, Charles Thomson, who for fifteen years held the pen of the old Congress, and arranged, with masterly hand, its daily business. On every side were men, less conspicuous ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... often had a favorable influence on freedom of thought. His studies in economics had a strong tendency in that direction. His views about religious toleration were founded on his intense faith in civil liberty; and even his demonstration that lightning was an electrical phenomenon brought deliverance for mankind from an ancient terror. It removed from the domain of the supernatural a manifestation of formidable power that had been supposed to be a weapon of the arbitrary gods; and ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... very time were through the bishops, to whom they were the sole centre in so many changes and upheavals, constructing the new order of things. Through them the Church maintained her own liberty, and allied with it a civil liberty which the East ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... the old Negro did not have true moral training, he did have positive training in the opposite direction. For the very system under which he lived was a training in evil. His ancestors had been stolen; he himself was stolen; his civil liberty was stolen. Could he form any adequate conception of property rights? And is it now a matter of surprise to us that the old man sometimes did a little stealing himself in order to relieve a hungry stomach? He was not taught the sacredness of the married life. Indeed, he was not taught to marry ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Calmly, in the midst of raging war, in despite of threats and cajolery, with a lofty, unspoken contempt for those false men who would urge to anarchy and infamy, this great people went up to the ballot-box, and gave in its adhesion to human equality, civil liberty, and universal freedom. And as the good tidings of great joy flashed over the wires from every quarter, men recognized the finger of God, and, laying aside all lower exultation, gathered in the public places, and, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth—that let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for. To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... whole community up to a plane of spirituality, it would be found that there and there only could be the highest measure of liberty. And this is my answer to those who grumble at the restriction of Sunday liberty. It is only the liberty of the senses that suffers. A higher and nobler civil liberty, moral liberty, social liberty, will work out of it. Sunday is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... come to the historians, we find that Prescott wrote of the romantic achievements of Spain in the days of her glory; Motley, of the struggles of the Dutch Republic to keep religious and civil liberty from disappearing from this earth; Parkman, of the contest of the English against the French and Indians to decide whether the institutions and literature of North America should ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... savagery of the wilderness; and in the swarming corruptions which were the natural result of an attempt to rule, by the absolute hand of a master beyond the Atlantic, a people bereft of every vestige of civil liberty. Civil liberty was given them by the British sword; but the conqueror left their religious system untouched, and through it they have imposed upon themselves a weight of ecclesiastical tutelage that finds few equals ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... monarchs, or 'tyrants,' as the Greeks would have called them, yet of these there has not been one, not even Philip of Spain, so bad as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero or Domitian, who were four in twelve among the Roman Emperors." When we find David Hume thus putting the matter, in his Essay on "Civil Liberty," it makes us at once see how highly unlikely it is that all the badness of human nature should have been concentrated in a few individuals who lived at a particular period and in a particular country, those individuals being ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the public enjoyment of all natural rights—are fully protected by political rights. These political liberties moreover claim not only the negative protection or non-interference of authority, but also its positive financial help. For political liberty exists for the protection of civil liberty, and not vice versa. The collective forces of a society are for the benefit of the individual and not the individual for them. A State is an institution for the protection of rights inherent ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... but take a deep interest in whatever relates to this young but growing Republic. Settled principally by emigrants from the United States, we have the happiness to know that the great principles of civil liberty are there destined to flourish under wise institutions and wholesome laws, and that through its example another evidence is to be afforded of the capacity of popular institutions to advance the prosperity, happiness, and permanent glory of the human race. The great truth that government was made ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... Pliny, in his Panegyricus (xxii.), describes his first entry into Rome. He might have assumed the state of a monarch or popular hero, but he walked afoot, conspicuous, pre-eminent, a head and shoulders above the crowd—a triumphal entry; but it was imperial arrogance, not civil liberty, over which he triumphed. "You were our king," he says, "and we your subjects; but we obeyed you as the embodiment of our laws." Martial (Epig., x. 72) hails him not as a tyrant, but an emperor—yea, more than an emperor—as ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... And yet, just as civil liberty itself is a compromise defended by prohibitions, so this particular sort of liberty must also have its qualifications. Carried to the absolute pitch the right of free movement ceases to be distinguishable from the right of free intrusion. We have already, in ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Clews one thing, and that is that the blessed condition of universal society in which Wall Street, having absorbed Lombard and Threadneedle, shall be supreme over the nations will occur only when our free American institutions shall be crushed into fragments and when civil liberty shall lie bleeding among the ruins. It will occur then, and not before. It will occur when the residue of the old American spirit has been stamped out, and when a miserable, slavish subserviency shall have been substituted for the revolutionary ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... down dark despotism from the lofty pinnacle of its summit altitude, where she was seated on her liberty-crushing throne, and hurled her out of her iron chariot, as her wheels thundered over the prostrate slaves of power!—(Amen)—Yes!—hark!—we make a noise about that! But what's civil liberty to religious liberty, and emancipated disenthraldom from the dark despotism of yonder terrific prince of darkness! whose broad, black, piniony wings spread wide o'er the aerial concave like a dense ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... were formed all over the country. It seemed not unlikely that the surprise of 1854 would be repeated, and that the great Republican party, which had done so much for civil liberty, would either be broken to pieces or would be brought to take an attitude totally inconsistent with ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... King William, during the whole of his reign; afterwards Principal of the University of Edinburgh, was a sincere and zealous friend both to religious and civil liberty, and he lived in reputation and honor till Dec. 28th, 1715. This worthy man was put to the torture before the privy council, in the latter end of the reign of Charles the Second. The Rev. Joseph M'Cormick, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property"—but they are as worried and as fearful as Hobbes' savages. So they, too, renounce their natural rights in favour of civil liberty, and are happy when they have got "a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... remarked that it was a valuable feature of the rules that they did hamper action and "that the country which is least governed is the best governed, is a maxim in strict accord with the idea of true civil liberty." William McKinley was also of the opinion that barriers were needed "against the wild projects and visionary schemes which will find advocates in this House." Some years later, when the subject was again up for discussion, Thomas B. Reed went to ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... civil state, man substitutes justice for instinct in his conduct, and gives to his actions a morality of which they were formerly devoid. What man loses by the contract is his natural liberty, and an illimitable right to all that tempts him and that he can obtain; what he gains is civil liberty, and a right of secure property in all ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... commander in the Don Juan of Moliere, its approach is audible above civil commotion, above the shrieks of frenzied orators, the howlings of a demoralized clergy, and the sound of battle. It brings with it the destruction of civil liberty, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... took a distinctly secular colour. The system of public education was regulated with such police-like exclusiveness that priests who insisted upon opening schools of their own for Catholic teaching were enabled to figure as champions of civil liberty and of freedom of opinion against despotic power. The noblesse lost whatever political influence it had regained during the Restoration. The few surviving Regicides who had been banished in 1815 were recalled to France, among them the terrorist ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... prospective. Meanwhile, the great and crying evil, from which the revolution had really sprung, was for ever abolished. The odious distinction of castes was at an end. Political liberty existed, perhaps, no longer; but civil liberty—the equality of all Frenchmen in the eye of the law—was, or seemed to be, established. All men henceforth must contribute to the state in the proportion of their means: all men appeal to the same tribunals; and no man, however meanly born, had it to say, that there was one post of power or ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... Madison often indulged in. But he felt strongly. Probably he, no more than many other wiser and older men, understood what was to be the end of the political struggle which was getting so earnest; but evidently in his mind it was religious rather than civil liberty which was to be guarded. "If the Church of England," he says in the same letter, "had been the established and general religion in all the Northern colonies, as it has been among us here, and uninterrupted harmony had prevailed ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... this restrictive code was successful. From a modern point of view it may appear less arbitrary than the suspension of the habeas corpus act for a whole year (1817-18), but it was assuredly tainted with a reactionary spirit, and was capable of being worked in a way inconsistent with civil liberty. That it was not so worked, on the whole, and caused less hardship than had been anticipated, was not so much the result of changes in the government itself, as of economic progress in the nation, aided by a healthier growth of public opinion. The violence ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... courts, when restrained by legal process or otherwise. Neither there nor in America could anything but foreign invasion or positive insurrection justify even Parliament or Congress in suspending the right to this palladium of civil liberty. ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... when published, shall on a fair and impartial trial be adjudged of a pernicious tendency, is necessary for the preservation of peace and good order, of government and religion, the only solid foundations of civil liberty. Thus, the will of individuals is still left free: the abuse only of that free will is the object of legal punishment. Neither is any restraint hereby laid upon freedom of thought or inquiry: liberty of private sentiment is still left; the disseminating, or making public, of ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the Revolution must have been to create a tendency to rebel against spiritual dictation. Republicanism levels in religion as in everything. It might have been expected, therefore, that soon after civil liberty had been established there would be conflicts between the traditional, authority of the minister and the claims of the now free and independent congregation. So it was, in fact, as for instance in the case which follows, for which the reader is indebted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and the work of the Gracchi tended to the extension of political freedom. In the history of politics these social struggles are among the most important events illustrative of the gradual dawn of civil liberty among a people which had been dominated and oppressed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... restricted by the law of any power. Even property belongs to the individual only by virtue of state concession. The social contract makes the state the master of the goods of its members,[10] and the latter remain in possession only as the trustees of public property.[11] Civil liberty consists simply of what is left to the individual after taking his duties as a citizen into account.[12] These duties can only be imposed by law, and according to the social contract the laws must be the same for all citizens. This is the only restriction upon ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... things. Yet Lyon's judges, and a jury of all nations, are objects of national fear. We agree in all the essential ideas of your letter. We agree particularly in the necessity of some reform, and of some better security for civil liberty. But perhaps we do not see the existing circumstances in the same point of view. There are many considerations dehors of the State, which will occur to you without enumeration. I should not apprehend them, if all ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... such a field was required for the operations of her armies; and it was also to the interest of that nation that Holland, whose welfare and prosperity are so closely connected with her own, should enjoy the blessings of national independence and civil liberty, guaranteed by internal strength as well ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... if, to gain his point, he did not, like the Duke of Alva, (employed in a similar vocation) make use of the rack, the stake, and the faggot, yet Lord Cornwallis resorted to every other mode of punishment, a more improved civilization had left him, to suppress civil liberty. Such was the character of the commander in chief of the British forces in ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... is the same with regard to the pamphlets that treat of religious and civil liberty; they are not only occasional, but intensely personal, even in their origins. The earliest of them, the five ecclesiastical pamphlets of the year 1641, deal with a question which had been of intimate concern to Milton ever since the beginning ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... elected Lord Mayor of London, re-elected for Middlesex, and at length allowed to take his seat in the House; he was for years the cause of popular tumults, the watchword of which was "Wilkes and Liberty"; the cause of civil liberty certainly owes something to him and to the popular agitations which an interest in him stirred ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... class of rights referred to. Thus the exercise of rights guarantied by the constitution or political law, is called political liberty. The free enjoyment of rights secured by the civil or municipal laws, is called civil liberty. And freedom of religious opinion and ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young
... feeble band of colonists, engaged in the arduous undertaking of a new settlement, in the wilds of North America. Their civil liberty being mutilated, and the enjoyment of their religious sentiments denied them, in the land that gave them birth, they fled their country, they braved the dangers of the then almost unnavigated ocean, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various |
