Liberty makes people unhappy

A people without superstition would be philosophical and philosophers will never obey. The people can be happy only if they are crushed, downtrodden, kept in chains.

[To Voltaire] Your first passion is love of humanity. That love blinds you. Love humanity, but you can only love it as it is. It is incapable of the benefits you would lavish upon it; and, giving them, you would only make it more unhappy and more wicked. Leave it the monster which devours it; the monster is dear to it. I never laughed so much as when I saw Don Quixote having a very hard time defending himself from the galley slaves to whom he had just magnanimously given their freedom.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (6, 10)

Stoic influences

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Viktor E. Frankl - Man's search for Meaning

Liberty and human nature

CLAUDIO:
From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty:
As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our nature do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.

William Shakespeare - Measure for measure (I, 3)

Liberty according to Dominique Francon

To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead