freedom quotes

He who is brave is free.

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.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

Freedom is the right to live as we wish.

Fearlessness is not only possible, it is the ultimate joy. When you touch nonfear, you are free.

The approach of liberty makes even an old man brave.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

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.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom – and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Where liberty is, there is my country.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

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

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.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

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

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

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.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: ‚This is my country.‘

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

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

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

The best road to progress is freedom’s road.

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

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

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

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.

If we are not free, no one will respect us.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism.

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.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in that we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve – not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country – those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy – the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.