Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

Voltaire

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

Lenin

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

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

Adams, John

The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

Maistre, Joseph De

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

Pericles

10.

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

Luther, Martin

11.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

12.

I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.

Malcolm X

13.

In the light of his vision he has found his freedom: his thoughts are peace, his words are peace and his work is peace.

Dhammapada

14.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

Friedman, Milton

15.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Johnson, Lady Bird

16.

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

Madriaga, Salvador De

17.

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

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

20.

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.

21.

Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.

Cicero, Marcus T.

22.

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

Madonna

23.

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

24.

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

Hamilton, Edith

25.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

27.

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

Sieyes, Abbe

28.

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.

29.

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

Diderot, Denis

30.

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

O'Keeffe, Georgia

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

Covey, Stephen R.

34.

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

Malcolm X

35.

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

Kelly, Grace (Patricia)

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

Freedom is just chaos with better lighting.

Foster, Alan Dean

40.

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

Richards, Mary Caroline

41.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

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.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Orwell, George

44.

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

Mckern, Leo

45.

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

46.

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.