Freedom Quotes

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.

~ Orson Scott Card

There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.

~ Miguel Ruiz

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.

~ Alan Moore

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

~ Muhammad Ali

Secrecy begets tyranny.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

~ John Adams

Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.

~ Noam Chomsky

A man’s spirit is free, but his pride binds him with chains of suffocation in a prison of his own insecurities

~ Jeremy Aldana

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

~ Kris Kristofferson

There are only two things to worry about in life: either you’re free or you’re not. If you’re free, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re not, you kick the shit out of everything around you until you are.

~ Karen Marie Moning

Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.

~ Vladimir Lenin

What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.

~ Madeleine K. Albright

The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You'reborn with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something youassume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree towhich you resist is the degree to which you are free...

~ Utah Phillips

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

~ Kahlil Gibran

This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from others, meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant, and happy.

~ George Washington

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

~ Carson Mccullers

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

~ Salman Rushdie

Democracy is in the blood of the Muslims, who look upon complete equality of mankind, and believe in fraternity, equality, and liberty.

~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.

~ Lauren Oliver

Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.

~ Marvin Simkin

She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing “yes” in the sky.

~ Monique Duval

We love our lovin'....but not like we love our freedom.

~ Joni Mitchell

You can do anything you want. You don't believe me. You think, she's out of her head. Yeah, I'm out of my head- on being me. What are you on? On being them. You don't even know. I bet you were never given a chance to know. ....Listen. You can be anything you want to be. Be careful. It's a spell. It's magic. Listen to the words.... You are anything...everyone, anyone. ...You listen to them, teachers, parents, politicians. They're always saying, if you steal you're a thief, if you sleep aroung you're a slut, if you take drugs you're a junkie. They want to get inside your head and control you with their fear. ...Don't play their game. Nothing can touch you; you stay beautiful.

~ Melvin Burgess

There’s glory and honour in being chosen. But not much room for free will

~ Elizabeth Wein

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life.— from Bhagat Singh's prison diary, p. 124

~ Bhagat Singh

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

~ Timothy Leary

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.

~ Thomas Paine

Life calls the tune, we dance.

~ John Galsworthy

Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.

~ Lance Morrow

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims.United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for?The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

~ Salman Rushdie

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

~ Herbert Marcuse

If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.

~ Elizabeth I

Chains of gold are still chains.

~ Robert Thier

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

~ Edmund Burke

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace

~ Dean Koontz