Motivational Quotes

Freedom

There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

- Kingsley, Charles

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Horace

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

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

Ewer, W. N.

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

To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in.

Doren, Mark Van

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

Albert Einstein

10.

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

11.

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

Bhagavad Gita

12.

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

13.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams, John

14.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

15.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

16.

There's something contagious about demanding freedom.

Morgan, Robin

17.

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

18.

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

James, William

19.

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

Covey, Stephen R.

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.

Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

22.

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

23.

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

Persius

24.

A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

25.

A hot bath! I cry, as I sit down in it! Again as I lie flat, a hot bath! How exquisite a pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigors, the austerities, the renunciation of the day.

Macaulay, Rose

26.

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

27.

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

28.

If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails.

Buscaglia, Leo

29.

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

30.

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

Adams, John

31.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Luxemburg, Rosa

32.

Liberty is the right to choose, freedom is the result of that choice.

33.

No one who lives in error is free.

Euripides

34.

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.

Carl Schurz

35.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Cooley, Charles Horton

37.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

38.

There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Kingsley, Charles

39.

The secret of freedom, courage.

Thucydides

40.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Brown, Norman O.

44.

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

Maistre, Joseph De

45.

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.

46.

This is America. You can do anything here.

Turner, Robert E.

47.

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

48.

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

Macleish, Archibald

49.

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

50.

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

Epictetus