freedom quotes

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

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.

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

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

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.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

Freedom does not die from frontal attack. It dies because men in power no longer believe in a system based upon liberty.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

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

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.

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

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

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.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

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

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.

I don’t believe in guilt; I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person. And don’t judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

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.

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.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

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

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.

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

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.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

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.

There’s something about death that is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now.

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

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

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.

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.

Empire and liberty.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

Most liberals think of civil liberties as their Achilles heel. It isn’t.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

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.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

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?

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

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.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

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

Violent means will give violent freedom. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.

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.

The tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Only the educated are free.

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