Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

- Persius

Best Quotes about Freedom

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.

Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.

Adams, John

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

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

The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.

Voltaire

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

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

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

Adams, John

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

Orwell, George

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

13.

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

Epictetus

14.

In the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.

Baruch, Bernard M.

15.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

Lord Acton

16.

When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of happiness has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.

Arendt, Hannah

17.

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

18.

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

Ruskin, John

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Hill, Christopher

28.

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

Lenin

29.

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

30.

All we have of freedom -- all we use or know -- this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.

Kipling, Rudyard

31.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

Malcolm X

32.

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.

33.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

37.

The free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.

Blum, Leon

38.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

It is true that liberty is precious. So precious that it must be rationed.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

40.

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

41.

The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

43.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

44.

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.