Freedom Quotes

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 lives.

Sri Madhava

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill - Fated creature is born.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov".

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.

Mahatma Gandhi

The case for trade is not just monetary, but moral. Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.

George W. Bush, speech, November 19, 1999

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty.

Frank Herbert, Dune

People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - Are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a have type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a have not type of self.

Eric Hoffe

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

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We must determine whether we really want freedom - - whether we are willing to dare the perils of... rebirth... For we never take a step forward without surrendering something that we may have held dear, without dying to that which has been.

Virginia Hanson

And that this country shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government, of the people, for the people, by the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Freedom is being able to live with the consequences of your decisions.

James X. Mullen

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Colette

The freedom of poetic license.

Cicero, Pro Publio Sestio

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well - wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

John Quincy Adams

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Sren Aaby Kierkegaard

Until you lose your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

Margaret Mitchell

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its root, and in that freedom bold.

William Wordsworth

They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.

Kahil Gibran, Spirits Rebellious

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. ... The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission. Announcing blockade of Cuba.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will Lose its freedom and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too.

W. Somerset Maugham

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Robert Francis Kennedy

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishfull thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers chapter 4

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

Rudyard Kipling

When an American says that he loves his country, he... means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self - Respect.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty but it is religion and morality alone that can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.

John Adams

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Peter Kropotkin

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Laughter is the first evidence of freedom.

Rosario Castellanos

Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.

John Adams

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

There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity.

Chester Bowles

The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.

George W. Bush, Speech to UN General Assembly, September 21, 2004

Even though I was their captive, the Indians allowed me quite a bit of freedom. I could walk about freely, make my own meals, and even hurl large rocks at their heads. It was only later that I discovered they were not Indians at all, but dirty clothes hampers.

Jack Handey Deep Thoughts

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

George Carlin

Indignation boils my blood at the thought of the heritage we are throwing away; at the thought that, with few exceptions, the fight for freedom is left to the poor, forlorn and defenseless, and to the few radicals and revolutionaries who would make use of liberty to destroy, rather than to maintain, American institutions.

Arthur Garfield Hays

The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.

Robert Jackson

Make no mistake about it: Operation Desert Storm truly was a victory of good over evil, of freedom over tyranny, of peace over war.

Dan Quayle, remarks at Arlington National Cemetery