Motivational Quotes

Freedom

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

- Pascal, Blaise

Best Quotes about Freedom

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams, John

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

Voltaire

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Orwell, George

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.

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.

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Buck, Pearl S.

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

Luxemburg, Rosa

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Thomas Jefferson

10.

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

Lord Acton

11.

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

Arnold, Sir Edwin

12.

We gain freedom when we have paid the full price...

Tagore, Rabindranath

13.

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

14.

He who is brave is free.

Seneca

15.

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

Maistre, Joseph De

16.

Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought. Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us; to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Lincoln, Abraham

17.

Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired.

George, David Lloyd

18.

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.

Norton, Eleanor Holmes

19.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

Governing sense, mind and intellect, intent on liberation, free from desire, fear and anger, the sage is forever free.

Bhagavad Gita

21.

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

22.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

23.

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

Kennedy, John F.

24.

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

25.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

26.

We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

27.

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

28.

Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself.

Horace

29.

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

Brown, Norman O.

30.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

Adams, John

31.

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

Washington, George

32.

Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.

Aristotle

33.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

Pascal, Blaise

34.

When I was a boy I used to do what my father wanted. Now I have to do what my boy wants. My problem is: When am I going to do what I want?

Levenson, Samuel

35.

Freedom is an internal achievement rather than an external adjustment.

Powell, Adam Clayton

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom: and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too.

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

41.

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

42.

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

43.

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.

Barton, Bruce

44.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

Eliot, T. S.

45.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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

Sahib, The Siri Singh

47.

A forest bird never wants a cage.