Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.

Patricia Sampson

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

Lenin

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Mencken, H. L.

This is America. You can do anything here.

Turner, Robert E.

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

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

Pound, Ezra

10.

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.

11.

Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.

Baldwin, James

12.

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

Albert Einstein

13.

We are all of us the worse for too much liberty.

Terence

14.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

15.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

16.

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

Thomas Jefferson

17.

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

Sieyes, Abbe

18.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

19.

Whatever the price, identify it now. What will you have to go through to get where you want to be? There is a price you can pay to be free of the situation once and for all. It may be a fantastic price or a tiny one -- but there is a price.

Browne, Harry

20.

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.

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

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

Adams, John

27.

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

Silesius, Angelus

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

Greer, Germaine

31.

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

Buscaglia, Leo

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

36.

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

37.

Freedom is only granted us that obedience may be more perfect.

Ruskin, John

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Freedom is an internal achievement rather than an external adjustment.

Powell, Adam Clayton

41.

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

Richards, Mary Caroline

42.

American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.

Howe, Edgar Watson

43.

We are free to yield to truth.