Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Freedom

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Walker, Alice

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

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

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

Hill, Christopher

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

The traveler has reached the end of the journey! In the freedom of the infinite he is free from all sorrows, the fetters that bound him are thrown away, and the burning fever of life is no more.

Dhammapada

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

Because you are in control of your life. Don't ever forget that. You are what you are because of the conscious and subconscious choices you have made.

Barbara Hall

This is America. You can do anything here.

Turner, Robert E.

10.

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.

11.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

King Jr. Martin Luther

12.

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

O'Keeffe, Georgia

13.

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

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

16.

You can only be free if I am free.

Darrow, Clarence

17.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Johnson, Lady Bird

18.

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Bevan, Aneurin

19.

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

23.

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

24.

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

Bhagavad Gita

25.

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

26.

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

Chomsky, Noam

27.

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

Thomas Jefferson

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Orwell, George

31.

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

32.

When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.

Malcolm X

33.

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.

34.

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally being lived. They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates and society.

Covey, Stephen R.

35.

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

George, David Lloyd

36.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

37.

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.

38.

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

Macleish, Archibald

39.

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)

40.

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

41.

We gain freedom when we have paid the full price...

Tagore, Rabindranath

42.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt

43.

Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.

Lawana Blackwell

44.

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

Hamilton, Edith

45.

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.

46.

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.

47.

I gave my life for freedom --this I know: For those who bade me fight had told me so.

Ewer, W. N.

48.

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

49.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

50.

Freedom is a condition of mind, and the best way to secure it is to breed it.

Hubbard, Elbert