Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.

Henry, Patrick

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

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

Freedom is just chaos with better lighting.

Foster, Alan Dean

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

Clinton, Bill

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

Within yourself deliverance must be searched for, because each man makes his own prison.

Arnold, Sir Edwin

10.

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

Durant, William J.

11.

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

Brown, Norman O.

12.

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.

13.

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

Sackville-West, Vita

14.

Set me free from evil passions, and heal my heart of all inordinate affections; that being inwardly cured and thoroughly cleansed, I may be made fit to love, courageous to suffer, steady to persevere.

Kempis, Thomas

15.

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

16.

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)

17.

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

18.

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

Patricia Sampson

19.

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

Cioran, E. M.

20.

There are always risks in freedom. The only risk in bondage is breaking free.

Bellin, Gita

21.

It is quite impossible to guarantee world peace. But is should be possible to guarantee world freedom.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Orr, Lord Boyd

25.

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

Orwell, George

26.

It is easy to believe in freedom of speech for those with whom we agree.

Mckern, Leo

27.

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

Covey, Stephen R.

28.

We are free to yield to truth.

Horace

29.

Only law can give us freedom.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

Dass, Ram

31.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

32.

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

Blum, Leon

33.

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

Greer, Germaine

34.

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

Voltaire

35.

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

Pike, Albert

36.

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

37.

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

Hoffer, Eric

38.

It will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

Braun, Wernher Von

39.

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

Ruskin, John

40.

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

Epictetus

41.

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

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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.

44.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

45.

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

46.

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

Lenin

47.

The saving man becomes the free man.

Proverb, Chinese

48.

Freedom exists only with power.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

49.

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, streams like the thunderstorm against the wind.

Byron, Lord

50.

It is my right to be uncommon. For I do not choose to be a common man, If I can, I seek opportunity. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the government look after me. I choose to take the calculated risk, to dream, to build, to fail or succeed. I choose not to barter incentive for a dole, I prefer the challenges of life to a guaranteed existence, the thrill of fulfillment to the state calm of Utopia. I will not trade my freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout.