Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people.

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

I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

In the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy as a prisoner’s chains.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities between one extreme and another.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Some of my colleagues argue that by further curtailing our Second Amendment rights, they can enhance public safety. Fine, the burden of proof is on them.

Personally, I don’t wear fur.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice… No one can prevent you from being aware of each step you take or each breath in and breath out.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

I just know that I’m a fan of all different kinds of genres. You’re supposed to be free doing music, and that’s how I feel.

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.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

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.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

If proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

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

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

To be free is to have achieved your life.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

The success I have achieved in bodybuilding, motion pictures, and business would not have been possible without the generosity of the American people and the freedom here to pursue your dreams.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change.

I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It’s one of the reasons I dropped out of school.

The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror – and America is honored to be their friend.

Taste cannot be controlled by law.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

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.