Freedom Quotes

(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute

~ Bruce Sterling

There is so much freedom in not having to choose.

~ Megan Hart

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

When you truly sing, you sing yourself free. When you truly dance, you dance yourself free. When you walk in the mountains or swim in the sea, again, you set yourself free.

~ Jay Woodman

Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.

~ Thomas Jefferson

It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.

~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Freedom is not a license to act but a license to exercise free choices in any given situation.

~ Vera Nazarian

It was great. Freedom even the imagined kind always is.

~ Sarah Dessen

What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind. America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who -- with their hands, their intelligence and their heart -- built the greatest nation in the world: ‘Come, and everything will be given to you.’ She said: ‘Come, and the only limits to what you'll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent.

~ Nicolas Sarkozy

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.

~ Tom Hodgkinson

No one could ever truly be free as long as they loved, and life wasn't worth living without love. So freedom? Overrated.

~ Gena Showalter

All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.'I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it?Toby: God bless America.

~ Aaron Sorkin

Charity is today a 'political charity.'. . . it means the transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others. This transformation ought to be directed toward a radical change in the foundation of society, that is, the private ownership of the means of production.

~ Gustavo Gutiérrez

If this is vise I want no virtue....I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars....But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

~ Ayn Rand

If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.(pg.89, Think Little)

~ Wendell Berry

Today I will masterbate!Okay, that was a mistake. I should have written Today I will masterbate--if I want to!

~ Al Franken

When will it begin, anyway? Sirus held his gaze for a moment, his eyes full of concern- a concern that Joss didn't understand. Probably sooner than you're ready for. When's that? Well. Sirus sighed, as if doing the math in his head.It'll take us about three minutes to gather this stuff and get to the cabin, and another two or three for Abraham to realize you're here. So I'd say you have about seven more minutes of freedom left.

~ Heather Brewer

There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The paralysis of potential is essential to the manufacturing of victims.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Do you have a pet bird?' I asked, looking around the room.'Oh, heavens, no. I'd never cage a bird. I can't imagine a worse fate, can you? I bought this cage at a market in Peru several years ago. I hung it here and wired the door open to remind myself how delicious freedom is -- financial and otherwise.

~ Beth Hoffman

Perfect Liberty follows no rules, law, or any virtue for that matter. It disregards respect, courteousness, and love.

~ Veronica Mist

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

~ James Madison

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

~ Chinua Achebe

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

~ Abraham Lincoln

We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.

~ Charles E. Schaefer

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

~ Eugene V. Debs

This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.

~ Aldous Huxley

It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek

Freedom began on the day the first sheep wandered away from the herd.

~ Marty Rubin

As I went walking I saw a sign thereAnd on the sign it said No Trespassing.But on the other side it didn't say nothing,That side was made for you and me.This land is your land, this land is my landFrom California to the New York islandFrom the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream watersThis land was made for you and me.

~ Woody Guthrie

But we do not merely protest, we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears, the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back impetuously at the sight of the bridle; while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur: so savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke to which civilised man submits without a murmur, but prefers the most turbulent state of liberty to the most peaceful slavery. We cannot therefore, from the servility of nations already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former are for ever holding forth in praise of the tranquillity they enjoy in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace: miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword and death, to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The secret of happiness is freedom but to be totally free you need to earn: courage, persistence and boldness.

~ Santosh Kalwar

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.

~ Stefan Molyneux

To view the opposition as dangerous is to misunderstand the basic concepts of democracy. To oppress the opposition is to assault the very foundation of democracy.

~ Aung San Suu Kyi

This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.

~ Douglas Pagels