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

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

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Mark Twain

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

Who then is free? The one who wisely is lord of themselves, who neither poverty, death or captivity terrify, who is strong to resist his appetites and shun honors, and is complete in themselves smooth and round like a globe.

Horace

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Epictetus

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

Chomsky, Noam

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

Hegel, Georg

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

10.

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

Lawana Blackwell

11.

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

James, William

12.

We are free to yield to truth.

Horace

13.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

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

16.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Rushdie, Salman

17.

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.

Barton, Bruce

18.

Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

Covey, Stephen R.

21.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

Herbert, Frank

22.

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

23.

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)

24.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

26.

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

Madonna

27.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

George, David Lloyd

29.

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.

30.

If we catch a glimpse of freedom, we wish to possess it; if we catch a glimpse of death, we want nothing to do with it. One we cannot have, the other we cannot avoid.

Johnson, Jeremy P.

31.

The foolish and the uneducated have little use for freedom.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

35.

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

Thomson, Linda

36.

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

37.

The sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called Liberty.

Pike, Albert

38.

Freedom is just chaos with better lighting.

Foster, Alan Dean

39.

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

40.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Alan Dean Foster

41.

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

Ewer, W. N.

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

Hoffer, Eric

45.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

46.

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

47.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

Yeltsin, Boris

48.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

49.

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

Clinton, Bill

50.

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