Freedom Quotes

...new prejudices will serve as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses.For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point. But I hear on all sides, 'Do not argue!' The Officer says: 'Do not argue but drill!' The tax collector: 'Do not argue but pay!' The cleric: 'Do not argue but believe!' Only one prince in the world says, 'Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!' Everywhere there is restriction on freedom.

~ Immanuel Kant

Don't I deserve to finally be free of you?

~ Laini Taylor

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

~ Stephen Jay Gould

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

~ Bill Moyers

My life is an adventure. she said, growing confident as she opened her eyes again. I will not be shackled to this satellite anymore.

~ Marissa Meyer

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

~ Milton Friedman

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

~ Jack Kerouac

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

~ Sharon Creech

Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriately as she could.

~ Paulo Coelho

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain it.

~ Abraham Lincoln

You ought to live your life with such freedom and joy that uptight Christians will doubt your salvation.

~ Steve Brown

Someday, the realm of liberty and justice will encompass the planet. Freedom is not just the birthright of the few, it is the God-given right of all His children, in every country. It won't come by conquest. It will come, because freedom is right and freedom works. It will come, because cooperation and good will among free people will carry the day.

~ Ronald Reagan

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

~ Adlai E. Stevenson Ii

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

~ Thomas Sowell

I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.

~ Jon Krakauer

Government leaders are amazing. So often it seems they are the last to know what the people want.

~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality, those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

~ Gilles Deleuze

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.

~ Terry Goodkind

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The free man never thinks of escape.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I love my country, not my government.

~ Jesse Ventura

The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

~ Nelson Mandela

The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.

~ Wendell Berry

Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.

~ Danielle Bernock

He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.... We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different world, and then we'll build... The Republic of Heaven.

~ Philip Pullman

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.

~ Voltaire

So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.

~ Franz Kafka

Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.

~ Faye Wattleton

Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.

~ Criss Jami

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Freedom is just chaos with better lighting

~ Alan Dean Foster

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

~ Toni Morrison

United States: the country where liberty is a statue.

~ Nicanor Parra

And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fullfilment. you should be free indeed when your days are not without care nor your nights without a word and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked unbound.

~ Kahlil Gibran