Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

Best Quotes about Freedom

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Bevan, Aneurin

The saving man becomes the free man.

Proverb, Chinese

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Lowell, James Russell

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.

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

Persius

We are free to yield to truth.

Horace

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Madriaga, Salvador De

12.

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

13.

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

Blum, Leon

14.

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

15.

None can love freedom heartily, but good men... the rest love not freedom, but license.

Milton, John

16.

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

17.

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)

18.

It is quite possible for someone to choose incorrectly or to judge badly; but freedom must allow such mistakes.

Sang Kyu Shin

19.

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.

20.

Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.

Lincoln, Abraham

21.

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

Covey, Stephen R.

22.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

23.

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.

Wordsworth, William

24.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

Only law can give us freedom.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Silesius, Angelus

29.

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

La Follette, Suzanne

30.

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

31.

We must determine whether we really want freedom -- whether we are willing to dare the perils of... rebirth... For we never take a step forward without surrendering something that we may have held dear, without dying to that which has been.

Hanson, Virginia

32.

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

Hill, Christopher

33.

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

Hoffer, Eric

34.

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

Hamilton, Edith

35.

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

Sieyes, Abbe

36.

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

Durant, William J.

37.

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

Ruskin, John

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.

Lawana Blackwell

40.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Luxemburg, Rosa

41.

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.

42.

There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Kingsley, Charles

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Clinton, Bill

46.

Freedom is the opportunity to make decisions...

Hildebrand, Kenneth

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

50.

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.