Motivational Quotes

Freedom

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

- Kennedy, John F.

Best Quotes about Freedom

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

Gordimer, Nadine

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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.

We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

Hegel, Georg

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

Rushdie, Salman

It will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

Braun, Wernher Von

Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought. Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us; to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Lincoln, Abraham

10.

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

11.

No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.

Cooley, Charles Horton

12.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

Hoffer, Eric

13.

So free we seem, so fettered we are!

Browning, Robert

14.

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

Ewer, W. N.

15.

Within yourself deliverance must be searched for, because each man makes his own prison.

Arnold, Sir Edwin

16.

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.

Carl Schurz

17.

A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

19.

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

Kelly, Grace (Patricia)

20.

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.

21.

It is quite impossible to guarantee world peace. But is should be possible to guarantee world freedom.

22.

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

Maistre, Joseph De

23.

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

Orr, Lord Boyd

24.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

25.

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

Adams, John

26.

When I was a boy I used to do what my father wanted. Now I have to do what my boy wants. My problem is: When am I going to do what I want?

Levenson, Samuel

27.

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.

28.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

29.

The sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called Liberty.

Pike, Albert

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.

Freedom is a condition of mind, and the best way to secure it is to breed it.

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

Diderot, Denis

33.

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

34.

Freedom is but the possibility of a various and indefinite activity; while government, or the exercise of dominion, is a single, yet real activity. The longing for freedom, therefore, is at first only too frequently suggested by the deep-felt consciousness of its absence.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

35.

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

36.

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

37.

Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself.

Horace

38.

When ever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is safe.

Burke, Edmund

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Just as war is freedom's cost, disagreement is freedom's privilege.

Clinton, Bill

42.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

43.

You can only be free if I am free.

Darrow, Clarence

44.

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

Epictetus

45.

When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.

Malcolm X

46.

American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.

Howe, Edgar Watson

47.

Set me free from evil passions, and heal my heart of all inordinate affections; that being inwardly cured and thoroughly cleansed, I may be made fit to love, courageous to suffer, steady to persevere.

Kempis, Thomas

48.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.

Wilson, Robert

50.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein