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

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Voltaire

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Mencken, H. L.

It will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

Braun, Wernher Von

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

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

It is quite possible for someone to choose incorrectly or to judge badly; but freedom must allow such mistakes.

Sang Kyu Shin

The secret of freedom, courage.

Thucydides

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

Reagan, Ronald

10.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. But without freedom, no socialism either, except the socialism of the gallows.

Camus, Albert

11.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

12.

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

13.

A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.

Cooley, Charles Horton

15.

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, streams like the thunderstorm against the wind.

Byron, Lord

16.

Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.

Pericles

17.

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

Madriaga, Salvador De

18.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Luxemburg, Rosa

19.

Set me free from evil passions, and heal my heart of all inordinate affections; that being inwardly cured and thoroughly cleansed, I may be made fit to love, courageous to suffer, steady to persevere.

Kempis, Thomas

20.

The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.

Wilson, Robert

21.

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

22.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege.

Hill, Christopher

27.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

28.

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

Mckern, Leo

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

Freedom -- to walk free and own no superior.

Whitman, Walt

34.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

Gordimer, Nadine

35.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

36.

Mankind has a free will; but it is free to milk cows and to build houses, nothing more.

Luther, Martin

37.

Freedom exists only with power.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

No man is free who is not a master of himself.

Epictetus

39.

Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.

Aristotle

40.

The grass is always greener where the fence isn't.

41.

If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails.

Buscaglia, Leo

42.

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

43.

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

O'Keeffe, Georgia

44.

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

May, Rollo

45.

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

46.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Orwell, George

47.

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

48.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

49.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Mark Twain

50.

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