Liberty, as it is conceived ...

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
 Mary McCarthy

More phrases

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.
 Thích Nhất Hạnh
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom - and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.

Quotes from the same author

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.
 Mary McCarthy
it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.
 Mary McCarthy
In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?
 Mary McCarthy
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
 Mary McCarthy
The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
 Mary McCarthy