Motivational Quotes

Freedom

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

Thomson, Linda

The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.

Baruch, Bernard M.

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

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

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

Bhagavad Gita

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

Collingwood, Robin G.

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

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)

10.

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

Chomsky, Noam

11.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

12.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Tagore, Rabindranath

13.

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

14.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

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

16.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

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.

18.

Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man.

Cervantes, Miguel De

19.

Whatever the price, identify it now. What will you have to go through to get where you want to be? There is a price you can pay to be free of the situation once and for all. It may be a fantastic price or a tiny one -- but there is a price.

Browne, Harry

20.

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

21.

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

Arnold, Sir Edwin

22.

He who dares not (reason), is a slave.

Drummond, William

23.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

24.

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

25.

This is America. You can do anything here.

Turner, Robert E.

26.

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

27.

Freedom is the opportunity to make decisions...

Hildebrand, Kenneth

28.

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

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

Colton, Charles Caleb

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

36.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

37.

The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.

Kelly, Grace (Patricia)

38.

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

Hill, Christopher

39.

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.

40.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

41.

Liberty is the right to choose, freedom is the result of that choice.

42.

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

43.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

There's something contagious about demanding freedom.

Morgan, Robin

45.

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

46.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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.

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.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

Dass, Ram

50.

Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought. Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us; to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Lincoln, Abraham