Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Best Quotes about Freedom

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Johnson, Samuel

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Ballou, Hosea

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.

Cobden, Richard

There's something contagious about demanding freedom.

Morgan, Robin

Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.

Lincoln, Abraham

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams, John

We gain freedom when we have paid the full price...

Tagore, Rabindranath

As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.

Baudrillard, Jean

We hold in our hands, the most precious gift of all: Freedom. The freedom to express our art. Our love. The freedom to be who we want to be. We are not going to give that freedom away and no one shall take it from us!

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

10.

If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches, they will take sandwiches.

Orr, Lord Boyd

11.

Freedom is an internal achievement rather than an external adjustment.

Powell, Adam Clayton

12.

When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of happiness has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.

Arendt, Hannah

13.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

14.

The traveler has reached the end of the journey! In the freedom of the infinite he is free from all sorrows, the fetters that bound him are thrown away, and the burning fever of life is no more.

Dhammapada

15.

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.

Wordsworth, William

16.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

Forster, Edward M.

17.

No one who lives in error is free.

Euripides

18.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

19.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

20.

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

21.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Walker, Alice

22.

There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Kingsley, Charles

23.

Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.

Baldwin, James

24.

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

25.

Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?

Persius

26.

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

Maistre, Joseph De

27.

It is my right to be uncommon. For I do not choose to be a common man, If I can, I seek opportunity. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the government look after me. I choose to take the calculated risk, to dream, to build, to fail or succeed. I choose not to barter incentive for a dole, I prefer the challenges of life to a guaranteed existence, the thrill of fulfillment to the state calm of Utopia. I will not trade my freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout.

28.

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

29.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

30.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

31.

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

Collingwood, Robin G.

32.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

Pascal, Blaise

33.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

Lord Acton

34.

Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.

Patricia Sampson

35.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

A hot bath! I cry, as I sit down in it! Again as I lie flat, a hot bath! How exquisite a pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigors, the austerities, the renunciation of the day.

Macaulay, Rose

37.

We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, That man is a Red, that man is a Communist. You never heard a real American talk in that manner.

Hague, Frank

38.

True obedience is true freedom.

Beecher, Henry Ward

39.

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.

Lumsden, Marshall

40.

He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

41.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Orwell, George

42.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

43.

If we catch a glimpse of freedom, we wish to possess it; if we catch a glimpse of death, we want nothing to do with it. One we cannot have, the other we cannot avoid.

Johnson, Jeremy P.

44.

Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.

Aristotle

45.

Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.

Voltaire

46.

The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.

Kelly, Grace (Patricia)

47.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

Adams, John

48.

Liberty is the right to choose, freedom is the result of that choice.

49.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

King Jr. Martin Luther

50.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Mark Twain