Motivational Quotes

Freedom

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

- Malcolm X

Best Quotes about 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.

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

Patricia Sampson

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.

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

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

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

Kipling, Rudyard

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

Pascal, Blaise

None can love freedom heartily, but good men... the rest love not freedom, but license.

Milton, John

A forest bird never wants a cage.

Ibsen, Henrik

10.

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.

11.

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

Sieyes, Abbe

12.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

King Jr. Martin Luther

13.

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Brown, Norman O.

14.

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

15.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Adams, John

16.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

Washington, George

17.

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

Adams, John

18.

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

Malcolm X

19.

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

Howard, Vernon

20.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

21.

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

Henry, Patrick

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

He who is brave is free.

Seneca

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson

26.

The secret of freedom, courage.

Thucydides

27.

No man is free who is not a master of himself.

Epictetus

28.

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

29.

Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.

Adams, John

30.

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

31.

Freedom, then, lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or bondage to the light that lightens all our olives.

Madhava, Sri

32.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

33.

There is no liberation without labor... and there is no freedom which is free.

Sahib, The Siri Singh

34.

There's something contagious about demanding freedom.

Morgan, Robin

35.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.

Voltaire

37.

The saving man becomes the free man.

Proverb, Chinese

38.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Alan Dean Foster

39.

We are all of us the worse for too much liberty.

Terence

40.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.

Cicero, Marcus T.

44.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Johnson, Lady Bird

45.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

46.

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

Franklin D. Roosevelt

47.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

Pound, Ezra

48.

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.

Madonna

50.

Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.