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

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.

Carl Schurz

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

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

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

May, Rollo

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

10.

Freedom -- to walk free and own no superior.

Whitman, Walt

11.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

Gordimer, Nadine

12.

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.

13.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Lowell, James Russell

14.

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

15.

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

Sieyes, Abbe

16.

We hold in our hands, the most precious gift of all: Freedom. The freedom to express our art. Our love. The freedom to be who we want to be. We are not going to give that freedom away and no one shall take it from us!

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

17.

No man is free who is not a master of himself.

Epictetus

18.

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

Malcolm X

19.

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

Scott, Hazel

20.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Ballou, Hosea

21.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

Dass, Ram

22.

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

Stone, I. F.

23.

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

Bhagavad Gita

24.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Johnson, Lady Bird

25.

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

26.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

28.

The foolish and the uneducated have little use for freedom.

29.

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

30.

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

Reagan, Ronald

31.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Adams, John

34.

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

Cooley, Charles Horton

35.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

36.

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

Washington, George

37.

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

Lumsden, Marshall

38.

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

39.

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

Collingwood, Robin G.

40.

If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails.

Buscaglia, Leo

41.

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

Hill, Christopher

42.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Pound, Ezra

46.

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Voltaire

50.

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

Byron, Lord