Freedom Quotes

Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression.

Malcolm X

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

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

Peter Ustinov

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

George Orwell

Art lives where absolute freedom is because when it is not, there can be no creativity.

Bruce Lee

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

Aung San Suu Kyi

A democracy is two wolves and a small lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Freedom under a constitutional republic is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.

Benjamin Franklin

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

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Speech, September 22, 1936

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Charles Lindbergh

Many politicians lay it down as a self - Evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Lord Macaulay

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Soren Kierkegaard

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Hannah Arendt

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

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

Chester Bowles

When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.

Walter Lippmann

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

David Riesman

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

We first have to find the way of freedom from involvement before we can introduce freedom in involvement.

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.

John G. Riefenbake

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

Bertrand Russell

And so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you - Ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, January 20, 1961

A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards.

Alan Simpson

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

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

Rudyard Kipling

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

Robert Francis Kennedy

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

Eric Hoffe

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 greatest lesson we can learn from the past... is that freedom is at the core of every successful nation in the world.

Frederick Chiluba

A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither.

Milton Friedman

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

Solitude is the beginning of all freedom.

William Orville Douglas

It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.

Zell Mille

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

On that day let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that all their efforts shall not have been in vain.

Dwight D. Eisenhowe

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

Dan Quayle, 5/22/89