Motivational Quotes

Freedom

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

- Greer, Germaine

Best Quotes about Freedom

We are all of us the worse for too much liberty.

Terence

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

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

Hamilton, Edith

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

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

Thomson, Linda

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Luther, Martin

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Lawrence, D. H.

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.

Norton, Eleanor Holmes

10.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

11.

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

12.

None can love freedom heartily, but good men... the rest love not freedom, but license.

Milton, John

13.

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.

14.

Freedom is just chaos with better lighting.

Foster, Alan Dean

15.

It is for each of us freely to choose whom we shall serve, and find in that obedience our freedom.

Richards, Mary Caroline

16.

It is my right to be uncommon. For I do not choose to be a common man, If I can, I seek opportunity. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the government look after me. I choose to take the calculated risk, to dream, to build, to fail or succeed. I choose not to barter incentive for a dole, I prefer the challenges of life to a guaranteed existence, the thrill of fulfillment to the state calm of Utopia. I will not trade my freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout.

17.

Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?

Persius

18.

Only law can give us freedom.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

20.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

21.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

He who is brave is free.

Seneca

23.

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

24.

Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired.

George, David Lloyd

25.

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

Sackville-West, Vita

26.

All we have of freedom -- all we use or know -- this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.

Kipling, Rudyard

27.

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

Malcolm X

28.

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

Cooley, Charles Horton

29.

Just as war is freedom's cost, disagreement is freedom's privilege.

Clinton, Bill

30.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Johnson, Lady Bird

32.

True obedience is true freedom.

Beecher, Henry Ward

33.

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

34.

American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.

Howe, Edgar Watson

35.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

36.

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

37.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

38.

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

39.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Alan Dean Foster

40.

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

41.

Bondage is... subjection to external influences and internal negative thoughts and attitudes.

Stone, W. Clement

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

45.

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.

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.

Durant, William J.

48.

We hold in our hands, the most precious gift of all: Freedom. The freedom to express our art. Our love. The freedom to be who we want to be. We are not going to give that freedom away and no one shall take it from us!

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

49.

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

50.

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