Motivational Quotes

Freedom

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

- Forster, Edward M.

Best Quotes about Freedom

Freedom exists only with power.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Sieyes, Abbe

A slave is a free man if he is content with his lot; a free man is a slave if he seeks more than that.

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

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

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

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.

Malcolm X

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Mencken, H. L.

10.

The foolish and the uneducated have little use for freedom.

11.

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

12.

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

Hoffer, Eric

13.

When I was a boy I used to do what my father wanted. Now I have to do what my boy wants. My problem is: When am I going to do what I want?

Levenson, Samuel

14.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

15.

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

Rushdie, Salman

16.

Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.

Dyer, Wayne

17.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Walker, Alice

18.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Reagan, Ronald

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.

Malcolm X

21.

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave. His fetters fall... freedom and slavery are mental states.

Gandhi, Mahatma

22.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

23.

I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.

Madonna

24.

Governing sense, mind and intellect, intent on liberation, free from desire, fear and anger, the sage is forever free.

Bhagavad Gita

25.

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

La Follette, Suzanne

26.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

Washington, George

27.

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

Silesius, Angelus

28.

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

Bellin, Gita

29.

He is free... who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide.

Madriaga, Salvador De

30.

Freedom, then, lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or bondage to the light that lightens all our olives.

Madhava, Sri

31.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

32.

For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.

Cary, Joyce

33.

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

34.

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

Arnold, Sir Edwin

35.

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

Voltaire

36.

If we catch a glimpse of freedom, we wish to possess it; if we catch a glimpse of death, we want nothing to do with it. One we cannot have, the other we cannot avoid.

Johnson, Jeremy P.

37.

You can only be free if I am free.

Darrow, Clarence

38.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

39.

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.

40.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

King Jr. Martin Luther

41.

It is quite impossible to guarantee world peace. But is should be possible to guarantee world freedom.

42.

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

43.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Brown, Norman O.

45.

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

46.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

47.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

48.

He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.

Augustine, St.

49.

Because you are in control of your life. Don't ever forget that. You are what you are because of the conscious and subconscious choices you have made.

Barbara Hall

50.

When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.

Malcolm X