Motivational Quotes

Freedom

Within yourself deliverance must be searched for, because each man makes his own prison.

- Arnold, Sir Edwin

Best Quotes about Freedom

The free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.

Blum, Leon

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Alan Dean Foster

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

Hegel, Georg

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Lowell, James Russell

The secret of freedom, courage.

Thucydides

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Adams, John

Freedom is the opportunity to make decisions...

Hildebrand, Kenneth

10.

Freedom is hunting, feeding, danger; that, that is freedom --that it is which makes the veins to swell, the breast to heave and glowaye,that is freedom, --that is pleasure --life!

Lovell, Marie

11.

Freedom is but the possibility of a various and indefinite activity; while government, or the exercise of dominion, is a single, yet real activity. The longing for freedom, therefore, is at first only too frequently suggested by the deep-felt consciousness of its absence.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

12.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

Chomsky, Noam

13.

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

14.

The higher one climbs on the spiritual ladder, the more they will grant others their own freedom, and give less interference to another's state of consciousness.

Twitchell, Paul

15.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

16.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson

17.

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.

Carl Schurz

18.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Mencken, H. L.

19.

It is true that liberty is precious. So precious that it must be rationed.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

20.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

21.

There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Kingsley, Charles

22.

We gain freedom when we have paid the full price...

Tagore, Rabindranath

23.

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Buck, Pearl S.

24.

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.

Cobden, Richard

25.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

26.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

Malcolm X

27.

Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.

Patricia Sampson

28.

Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.

Baldwin, James

29.

As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.

Baudrillard, Jean

30.

Marks on paper are free -- free speech -- press -- pictures all go together I suppose.

O'Keeffe, Georgia

31.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Colton, Charles Caleb

33.

He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

34.

Who then is free? The one who wisely is lord of themselves, who neither poverty, death or captivity terrify, who is strong to resist his appetites and shun honors, and is complete in themselves smooth and round like a globe.

Horace

35.

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Bevan, Aneurin

36.

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

37.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

King Jr. Martin Luther

38.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

40.

Freedom -- to walk free and own no superior.

Whitman, Walt

41.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

Adams, John

42.

Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.

Adams, John

43.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Washington, George

44.

No one who lives in error is free.

Euripides

45.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

46.

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.

Malcolm X

47.

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

Hamilton, Edith

48.

Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

Cioran, E. M.

50.

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.