Freedom Quotations
Benjamin Franklin:
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve
neither liberty or security.
C. Wright Mills:
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely
the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all,
the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then,
the opportunity to choose.
Carl Shurz:
If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full
measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
Clarence Darrow:
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's
freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
Dorothy Thompson:
When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is
relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
Dorothy Thompson:
Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many
respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of
private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially
selfish, with the general welfare.
Dorothy Thompson:
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that
ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
Edward R. Murrow:
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the
rights of people you don't agree with.
Epictetus:
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be
educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the
educated are free.
Discourses
Erich Fromm:
Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same
time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.
Eugene V. Debs:
Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind
that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I
say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a
criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Florynce Kennedy:
Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!
Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to
protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough
informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
Frederick Douglass:
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who
want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and
lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle
may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must
be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it
never will.
Goethe:
None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
H. L. Mencken:
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have
invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe
that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is
dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can
flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the
policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that
any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a
tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the
measure, is bound to become a slave.
H. L. Mencken:
The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel:
Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is
justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness.
Henry David Thoreau:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man
is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau:
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest
and the outlaw.
Hodding Carter:
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is
roots; the other, wings.
Hubert Humphrey:
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken
seriously.
James Baldwin:
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people
take, and people are as free as they want to be.
Jean-Paul Sartre:
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Jesse Jackson:
No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high.
No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should
never agree to surrender your dreams.
John Adams:
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to
trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Dewey:
The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence,
that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of
purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about
freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the
external or physical side of activity.
John F. Kennedy:
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign
ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid
to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation
that is afraid of its people. [American President]
John F. Kennedy:
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic
creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
[American President]
John F. Kennedy:
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is
always in vain. [American President]
John P. Zenger:
No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing,
or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and
became slaves.
John Philpot Curran:
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the
active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal
vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of
his crime and the punishment of his guilt. (1790)
John Stuart Mill:
The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is
that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his
independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind,
the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill:
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in
interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is
self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to
prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not
sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because
it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because,
in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part
of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which
concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is,
of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is
sovereign.
Leonid Brezhnev:
The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.
Lillian Hellman:
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
Margaret Sanger:
A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.
Marianne Williamson:
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission
to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically
liberates others.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach:
As far as your self-control goes, as far goes your freedom.
Marilyn Ferguson:
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
Mark Twain:
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably
precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to
practice neither. [American Author
Med Yones:
You think you are a free thinker? Think
again! Whether we like to admit it or not, we are a product of our
environment and its social programming. [International Institute of
Management]
Med Yones:
Beware of mental slavery, Never
underestimate the power of mental programming. How else do you think,
governments send their citizens to war killing themselves and hundreds of
thousands of innocent people, while having them thinking that they are brave
and patriotic? If mind programming can send people to their own deaths,
it can be used to change your life. Set mind free! [International
Institute of Management]
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. [Indian
Leader, Peace Guru]
Molly Ivins:
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to
extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
Noam Chomsky:
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to
come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are
easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of
'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often
we sere as willing or unwitting instruments." [American Scholar]
Noam Chomsky:
If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe
in it at all. [American Scholar]
Noam Chomsky:
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are
more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
[American Scholar]
Norman Thomas:
After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the
unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to
others, to win advancement.
Patrick Henry:
Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and
slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as
for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
Pearl S. Buck:
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of
the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
Peyton Conway March:
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most
in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by
giving them to someone else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?
Ramsey Clark:
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
Robert Frost:
Freedom lies in being bold.
Rosa Luxemburg:
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly,
without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution,
becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the
active element.
Rosa Luxemburg:
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
Sam Adams:
It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.
Samuel Adams:
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater
than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not
your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and
may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Simone Weil:
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to
choose.
Somerset Maugham:
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the
irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose
that too.
Soren Kierkegaard:
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom
of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
Thomas Jefferson:
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people
may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. [American President]
Thomas Jefferson:
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another,
and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. [American President]
Thomas Jefferson:
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own
pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor
and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government. [American
President]
Thomas Jefferson:
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted
to govern themselves without a master. [American President]
Thomas Jefferson:
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of
men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where
I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation
of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would
not go there at all. [American President]
Victor Frankl:
Everything can be taken from a man but ... the last of the human freedoms - to
choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own
way.
Viktor Frankl:
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.
Virginia Woolf:
To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control
ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting
half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly
and powerfully, here on the very spot.
Virginia Woolf:
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting
perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Voltaire:
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to
tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote
themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put
shackles upon sleeping men. [French Philosopher]
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