I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn’t have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.

If you’re a surfer, you just want to surf. You don’t know if anyone’s going to see you, and you don’t really care if they see you. You just live for that feeling.

For me, being raised in a free America made all the difference.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Fidelity and allegiance sworn to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we would swear ourselves slaves and the King absolute; whereas, by the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those oaths.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he be free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

You need to understand, if you take out a government, take out a regime, guess who becomes the government and regime and is responsible for the country? You are. So if you break it, you own it.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

Israelis would mostly breathe a sigh of relief if Palestinians were to disappear.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

And every human being is precious.

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

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

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

All I’m for is the liberty of the individual.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas… cultures… and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word ‚freedom‘ means than I see much evidence of in America.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Each time we cooperate with God, we take one more giant step forward. Because when God asks us to change, it means that He always has something better to give us – more freedom, greater joy, and greater blessings.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

Now I do whatever I want.

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

Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC’s military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.

Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.