Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

Best Quotes about Freedom

I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.

Madonna

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

Terence

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Bevan, Aneurin

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)

Freedom exists only with power.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Pound, Ezra

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

Scott, Hazel

10.

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

Lord Acton

11.

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

12.

Whatever the price, identify it now. What will you have to go through to get where you want to be? There is a price you can pay to be free of the situation once and for all. It may be a fantastic price or a tiny one -- but there is a price.

Browne, Harry

13.

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

14.

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

Milton, John

15.

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

16.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

Malcolm X

17.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Washington, George

18.

Freedom, then, lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or bondage to the light that lightens all our olives.

Madhava, Sri

19.

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

20.

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

Arnold, Sir Edwin

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.

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

Malcolm X

23.

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

Persius

24.

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

Durant, William J.

25.

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.

26.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

27.

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

Brown, Norman O.

28.

The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.

Malcolm X

29.

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

30.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

31.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

32.

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

Sieyes, Abbe

33.

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

Blum, Leon

34.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

35.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Orwell, George

36.

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

37.

When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of happiness has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.

Arendt, Hannah

38.

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

39.

Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.

Lincoln, Abraham

40.

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.

41.

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

Voltaire

42.

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.

43.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

45.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

46.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

47.

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

48.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.