Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

- Hamilton, Edith

Best Quotes about Freedom

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

Voltaire

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

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

Pound, Ezra

Only law can give us freedom.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

It is true that liberty is precious. So precious that it must be rationed.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

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.

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

Malcolm X

Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man.

Cervantes, Miguel De

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.

10.

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

Richards, Mary Caroline

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

Freedom -- to walk free and own no superior.

Whitman, Walt

15.

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

La Follette, Suzanne

16.

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

Reagan, Ronald

17.

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

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.

Freedom Know this, that every man is free To choose his life and what he'll be. For this eternal truth is given, God will force no man to heaven. He'll call, persuade, direct aright, Bless with wisdom, love, and light; In nameless ways be good and kind, But never force the human mind.

Clegg, William C.

20.

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

Brown, Norman O.

21.

The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

Camus, Albert

22.

There is no liberation without labor... and there is no freedom which is free.

Sahib, The Siri Singh

23.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

24.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

King Jr. Martin Luther

25.

Freedom is the right to live as we wish.

Epictetus

26.

A hungry man is not a free man.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

30.

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

31.

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

Hill, Christopher

32.

He who is brave is free.

Seneca

33.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

Washington, George

34.

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

Lord Acton

35.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

36.

We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, That man is a Red, that man is a Communist. You never heard a real American talk in that manner.

Hague, Frank

37.

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

Sevareid, Eric

38.

Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.

Seneca

39.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

Chomsky, Noam

40.

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.

Lumsden, Marshall

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Byron, Lord

44.

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

Orr, Lord Boyd

45.

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

Milton, John

46.

The grass is always greener where the fence isn't.

47.

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

Macleish, Archibald

48.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

49.

You can only be free if I am free.

Darrow, Clarence

50.

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.