Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Freedom is the opportunity to make decisions...

Hildebrand, Kenneth

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.

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

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Adams, John

Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

James, William

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

Voltaire

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

Kelly, Grace (Patricia)

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

Malcolm X

10.

Only law can give us freedom.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

Stone, I. F.

13.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

14.

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

Lenin

15.

This is America. You can do anything here.

Turner, Robert E.

16.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein

17.

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

Cooley, Charles Horton

18.

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

19.

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

20.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

22.

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

23.

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.

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.

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.

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

27.

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

Howard, Vernon

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

Persius

30.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

31.

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

Epictetus

32.

Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself.

Horace

33.

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

Voltaire

34.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

35.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Alan Dean Foster

36.

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

Aristotle

37.

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

38.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

39.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

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)

41.

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

Chomsky, Noam

42.

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

Madriaga, Salvador De

43.

American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.

Howe, Edgar Watson

44.

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

Luther, Martin

45.

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

46.

We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

47.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Sieyes, Abbe