You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.

—Erma Bombeck

That which distinguishes this day from all others is that then both orators and artillerymen shoot blank cartridges.

—John Burroughs

America is much more than a geographical fact. It is a political and moral fact — the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality.

—Adlai Stevenson

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

—George Bernard Shaw

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

—William Faulkner

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

—Thomas Macaulay

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority — literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.

 —Ignazio Silone

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

—Albert Camus

Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments. If we can get rid of the former, we may easily bear the latter.

—Benjamin Franklin

Equal and exact justice to all men…freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected, these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us.

—Thomas Jefferson