Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

Best Quotes about Freedom

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 oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Ballou, Hosea

We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, That man is a Red, that man is a Communist. You never heard a real American talk in that manner.

Hague, Frank

They want to be free and they do not know how to be just.

Sieyes, Abbe

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

Adams, John

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

Hamilton, Edith

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

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches, they will take sandwiches.

Orr, Lord Boyd

10.

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.

Lumsden, Marshall

11.

True obedience is true freedom.

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

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

13.

It is easy to believe in freedom of speech for those with whom we agree.

Mckern, Leo

14.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

Lord Acton

15.

We must determine whether we really want freedom -- whether we are willing to dare the perils of... rebirth... For we never take a step forward without surrendering something that we may have held dear, without dying to that which has been.

Hanson, Virginia

16.

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

Chomsky, Noam

17.

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

Cooley, Charles Horton

18.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

20.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

21.

There are always risks in freedom. The only risk in bondage is breaking free.

Bellin, Gita

22.

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.

Barton, Bruce

23.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

Adler, Mortimer J.

24.

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.

Wordsworth, William

25.

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.

Sackville-West, Vita

26.

Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.

Lawana Blackwell

27.

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

28.

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.

29.

The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

James, William

31.

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

32.

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

33.

Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.

Voltaire

34.

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness.

Sevareid, Eric

35.

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

Arnold, Sir Edwin

36.

While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.

Lenin

37.

The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.

Kennedy, Robert F.

38.

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

39.

Freedom is the opportunity to make decisions...

Hildebrand, Kenneth

40.

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

41.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

Hoffer, Eric

42.

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.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

44.

Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

45.

Only law can give us freedom.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

Freedom Know this, that every man is free To choose his life and what he'll be. For this eternal truth is given, God will force no man to heaven. He'll call, persuade, direct aright, Bless with wisdom, love, and light; In nameless ways be good and kind, But never force the human mind.

Clegg, William C.

47.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Mencken, H. L.

48.

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.

Voltaire

50.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.