Motivational Quotes

Freedom

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave. His fetters fall... freedom and slavery are mental states.

- Gandhi, Mahatma

Best Quotes about Freedom

Only law can give us freedom.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

Adler, Mortimer J.

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

Voltaire

Freedom -- to walk free and own no superior.

Whitman, Walt

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

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.

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

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

Greer, Germaine

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

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

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

Pike, Albert

11.

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

12.

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

Hill, Christopher

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

16.

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

17.

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

Milton, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Persius

21.

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

Durant, William J.

22.

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

23.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

24.

I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.

Malcolm X

25.

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave. His fetters fall... freedom and slavery are mental states.

Gandhi, Mahatma

26.

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

Malcolm X

27.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

Mandela, Nelson

28.

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

Voltaire

29.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

30.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

31.

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

32.

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

Maistre, Joseph De

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Epictetus

37.

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

Ewer, W. N.

38.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Johnson, Lady Bird

39.

Freedom is an internal achievement rather than an external adjustment.

Powell, Adam Clayton

40.

In the light of his vision he has found his freedom: his thoughts are peace, his words are peace and his work is peace.

Dhammapada

41.

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

42.

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.

Macleish, Archibald

43.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

49.

Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.

Lincoln, Abraham

50.

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

Kipling, Rudyard