Motivational Quotes

Freedom

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

- Cioran, E. M.

Best Quotes about Freedom

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.

Henry, Patrick

You can only be free if I am free.

Darrow, Clarence

The higher one climbs on the spiritual ladder, the more they will grant others their own freedom, and give less interference to another's state of consciousness.

Twitchell, Paul

Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.

Lincoln, Abraham

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

Scott, Hazel

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

Voltaire

A slave is a free man if he is content with his lot; a free man is a slave if he seeks more than that.

Freedom is the right to live as we wish.

Epictetus

10.

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.

11.

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

Thomson, Linda

12.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

13.

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

All we have of freedom -- all we use or know -- this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.

Kipling, Rudyard

15.

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

Silesius, Angelus

16.

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

17.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

18.

He is free... who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide.

Madriaga, Salvador De

19.

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

20.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

21.

Bondage is... subjection to external influences and internal negative thoughts and attitudes.

Stone, W. Clement

22.

The secret of freedom, courage.

Thucydides

23.

I gave my life for freedom --this I know: For those who bade me fight had told me so.

Ewer, W. N.

24.

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

25.

Governing sense, mind and intellect, intent on liberation, free from desire, fear and anger, the sage is forever free.

Bhagavad Gita

26.

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

27.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Rushdie, Salman

28.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

Malcolm X

29.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

30.

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

Adams, John

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.

Seneca

33.

There are always risks in freedom. The only risk in bondage is breaking free.

Bellin, Gita

34.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

Eliot, T. S.

35.

Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

36.

Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege.

Hill, Christopher

37.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

Dass, Ram

38.

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

39.

They want to be free and they do not know how to be just.

Sieyes, Abbe

40.

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Lawrence, D. H.

41.

We are free to yield to truth.

Horace

42.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Epictetus

43.

You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.

Malcolm X

44.

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.

Macleish, Archibald

45.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Tagore, Rabindranath

46.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt

47.

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

Maistre, Joseph De

48.

The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

49.

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

50.

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

Pascal, Blaise