Motivational Quotes

Freedom

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

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.

This is America. You can do anything here.

Turner, Robert E.

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)

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

Silesius, Angelus

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

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

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

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

10.

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

Bellin, Gita

11.

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

12.

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

13.

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.

14.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

Forster, Edward M.

15.

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

16.

We are free to yield to truth.

Horace

17.

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

Hill, Christopher

18.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

19.

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

20.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

23.

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

24.

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.

Cobden, Richard

25.

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

26.

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

Terence

27.

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

Arnold, Sir Edwin

28.

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.

29.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Reagan, Ronald

30.

Freedom is hunting, feeding, danger; that, that is freedom --that it is which makes the veins to swell, the breast to heave and glowaye,that is freedom, --that is pleasure --life!

Lovell, Marie

31.

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

32.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

33.

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

34.

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

Madriaga, Salvador De

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

Freedom is the right to live as we wish.

Epictetus

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

40.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.

Malcolm X

42.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.

Augustine, St.

45.

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

Sevareid, Eric

46.

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

Covey, Stephen R.

47.

True obedience is true freedom.

Beecher, Henry Ward

48.

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

Howard, Vernon

49.

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

Lord Acton

50.

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