Freedom Quotes

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

~ Jim Morrison

Life is too short to waste any amount of time on wondering what other people think about you. In the first place, if they had better things going on in their lives, they wouldn't have the time to sit around and talk about you. What's important to me is not others' opinions of me, but what's important to me is my opinion of myself.

~ C. Joybell C.

The unhappiest people in this world, are those who care the most about what other people think.

~ C. Joybell C.

Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.

~ Charlotte Brontë

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

~ Gilles Deleuze

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

~ Ronald Reagan

A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it's lowest ones

~ Nelson Mandela

Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

~ Patti Smith

For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

~ Isabelle Eberhardt

Music, my rampart and my only one.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower.

~ Adolf Hitler

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.

~ Judy Blume

You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker

~ Malcolm X

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

~ Vladimir Lenin

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

~ Albert Einstein

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

~ Leon Trotsky

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

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

~ Adam Smith

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

~ Max Stirner

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

~ Leon Trotsky

A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

~ José Martí

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.

~ Vladimir Lenin

Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country? Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.Socrates: How so, Plato?Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is asculptor.Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they haveno need to be reminded.Plato: That is correct.Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

People ought to fight to keep their law as to defend the citys walls.

~ Heraclitus

I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.

~ Michael Collins

Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules.

~ Aristotle

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

~ John Rawls

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

~ José Martí

When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.

~ Joel Salatin

It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

~ Vladimir Lenin

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.

~ Erich Fromm

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.

~ Stefan Molyneux

If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.

~ Stefan Molyneux

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future.

~ Stefan Molyneux

The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.

~ Stefan Molyneux

You were free, you are free and you will be free.

~ Santosh Kalwar