Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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)

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

Malcolm X

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

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

Epictetus

When ever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is safe.

Burke, Edmund

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

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

Adams, John

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness.

Sevareid, Eric

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Terence

13.

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

Silesius, Angelus

14.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. But without freedom, no socialism either, except the socialism of the gallows.

Camus, Albert

15.

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

La Follette, Suzanne

16.

Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.

Bolingbroke, Henry

17.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Johnson, Lady Bird

18.

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

Rushdie, Salman

19.

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

20.

Mankind has a free will; but it is free to milk cows and to build houses, nothing more.

Luther, Martin

21.

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

Albert Einstein

22.

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.

23.

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

Orwell, George

24.

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

Ewer, W. N.

25.

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

Malcolm X

26.

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

27.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

28.

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

Richards, Mary Caroline

29.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

30.

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

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

33.

He is free... who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide.

Madriaga, Salvador De

34.

If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches, they will take sandwiches.

Orr, Lord Boyd

35.

The foolish and the uneducated have little use for freedom.

36.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

37.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

38.

Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

39.

A slave is a free man if he is content with his lot; a free man is a slave if he seeks more than that.

40.

No one who lives in error is free.

Euripides

41.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

42.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

43.

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

44.

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.

Durant, William J.

45.

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.

Sackville-West, Vita

46.

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

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.

The fly that touches honey cannot use it's wings; so too the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins it's freedom and hinders contemplation.

Aurobindo, Ghose

49.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

50.

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