Freedom Quotes

By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence..

~ Joseph Sobran

In alien lands I keep the bodyOf ancient native rites and things:I gladly free a little birdieAt celebration of the spring.I'm now free for consolation,And thankful to almighty Lord:At least, to one of his creationsI've given freedom in this world!

~ Alexander Pushkin

Freedom is not an individual effort.Yours comes only when you grant others theirs

~ Sergio Aragonés

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

~ Louis Simpson

It is better to die fighting than to die on your knees.

~ Emiliano Zapata

While significant strides have been made in the pursuit of life expectancy, healthcare, educational opportunities, and constitutional protections for women, the Supreme Court, in particular, still wrestles with their status, as evidenced by their problems in pursuing equal opportunity in education and employment, reproductive freedom, the military, and violence against women.

~ David E. Wilkins

What drove us crazy wasn't necessarily the sexual freedom his critic claimed he was unleashing, but freedom, period. Freedom to be yourself, to express yourself, to wear what you wanted to wear, to look the way you wanted to look, to have your own style, your own talk.

~ Larry Geller

From the will of a freedom-fighter, Farzad Kamangar:Is it possible to be a teacher and not show the path to the sea to the little fish of the country? Is it possible to carry the heavy burden of being a teacher and be responsible for spreading the seeds of knowledge and still be silent? Is it possible to see the lumps in the throats of the students and witness their thin and malnourished faces and keep quiet? … I cannot imagine witnessing the pain and poverty of the people of this land and fail to give our hearts to the river and the sea, to the roar and the flood.

~ Samad Behrangi

Divorced?''Separated.'He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. 'Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don't want it.' (Novelty)

~ John Crowley

True freedom only exists in art.The problem is you have to be incredibly good.No,I am putting it wrong:You don't so much have to be outstanding,what you really need are connections,if you don't want to be dependent on all kinds of government foundations who will impose their ideas and restrictions on you in turn.It can be touch and go in the beginning:It takes guts to let go of everything.But you make it,you're free.

~ Esther Verhoef

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

~ George Orwell

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Let your will burn in this fire so that it takes you nowhere else. Let your self be burned in this fire of eternity, love and peace. Don't be afraid of this fire, it is love itself. This desire for freedom is the fire of love!

~ H.w.l. Poonja

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

~ Adam Michnik

The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power.

~ Susan Sontag

Liberty is to faction what air is to fire...

~ James Madison

[T]he state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

~ Michael J. Sandel

The highest and most fruitful form of human freedom is found in accepting, even more than in dominating. We show the greatness of our freedom when we transform reality, but still more when we accept it trustingly as it is given to us day after day. It is natural and easy to go along with pleasant situations that arise without our choosing them. It becomes a problem, obviously, when things are unpleasant, go against us, or make us suffer. But it is precisely then that, in order to become truly free, we are often called to choose to accept what we did not want, and even what we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here: one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control.

~ Jacques Philippe

For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree.For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.

~ Ernst Jünger

The love of Christ always helps us see beyond the faults of others.

~ Victor Manuel Rivera

But you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you? You who travel with the wind, what weathervane shall direct your course? What man's law shall bind you if you break your yoke but upon no man's prison door? What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man's iron chains? And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man's path? People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?

~ Kahlil Gibran

More important than starting well in our walk with God is to finish well.

~ Victor Manuel Rivera

Our expectation in ourselves must be higher than our expectation in others.

~ Victor Manuel Rivera

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

~ George Bernard Shaw

It is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed. The longing for freedom takes the form of crushing the enemy- there is always the enemy!- into the earth; and where and who is the enemy if there is no visible establishment to attack, to destroy with blood and fire? Remember all that oratory when freedom is threatened again. Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.

~ Katherine Anne Porter

Nobody objected to live in prisonif already felt comfortable living in it.

~ Toba Beta

But for Mozart love is only the litmus test. To determine whether one is truly free or not.

~ André Brink

He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye.

~ Graham Greene

Freedom is limited by the need to coexist.

~ Toba Beta

I have nothing to do with the partisans. I wish to defy society not in order to improve it, but to hold it at bay no matter what. I suspend my achievements – but also my demands.

~ Ernst Jünger

No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.

~ Wendy Mcelroy

And so it is to the printing press--to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news--that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

~ John F. Kennedy

Imagine yourself in Harriet Tubman's shoes. Fighting to be freed from deplorable conditions. Placing one foot in front of the other, putting slavery behind you. If a petite, abused slave can rise up, fight for freedom, secure the freedom of others, and change her world, so can I. And so can you.

~ Susie Larson

Man is guaranteed only those rights which he can defend.

~ Jack Mccoy

In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

I tip my hat to the new constitution, I take a bow for the new revolution, smile and grin at the change all around me.

~ The Who

And suddenly it came to him. That Strawberry Fields garden he'd come from, and the Freedom Tower he'd been thinking of: taken together, didn't they contain the two words that said it all about this city, the two words that really mattered? It seemed to him that they did. Two words: the one an invitation, the other an ideal, an adventure, a necessity. Imagine said the garden. Freedom said the tower. Imagine freedom. That was the spirit, the message of this city he loved. You really didn't need anything more. Dream it and do it. But first you must dream it.

~ Edward Rutherfurd

Our choices are truncated in evil's presence.

~ Michael Ventura

In the modern food landscape, the Krafts, Monsantos, and Archer Daniels Midlands are standing in the way of food democracy.

~ Brian Halweil

I have spent a great deal of my life struggling to keep myself in control. To know myself inside and out, everything In perfect order. I lose that when I'm with you. That frightens me, and it frightens me how much I like it. How tempting it is to lose myself in you. To let it go. To let you save me from breaking chandeliers rather than constantly worrying about it, myself.

~ Erin Morgenstern