Albert Einstein:
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
Aldous Huxley:
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.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Barbara Ehrenreich:
That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing -- the truly democratic thing about it -- is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.
Benjamin Franklin:
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
C. Wright Mills:
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.
Clarence Darrow:
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
Epictetus:
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Discourses
Eugene V. Debs:
Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.
Frederick Douglass:
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
H. L. Mencken:
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air ? that progress made under the shadow of the policeman?s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
H. L. Mencken:
The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
Henry David Thoreau:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Hodding Carter:
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.
Jean-Paul Sartre:
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Jesse Jackson:
No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.
John Dewey:
The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.
John F. Kennedy:
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
John P. Zenger:
No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.
John Philpot Curran:
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. (1790)
John Stuart Mill:
The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
Mahatma Gandhi:
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
Marilyn Ferguson:
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
Mark Twain:
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.
Molly Ivins:
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
Noam Chomsky:
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
Noam Chomsky:
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments."
Noam Chomsky:
If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.
Peyton Conway March:
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
"Boston" Stanza 15
Robert Frost:
Freedom lies in being bold.
Samuel Adams:
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Somerset Maugham:
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.
Thomas Jefferson:
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson:
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government.
Thomas Jefferson:
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Thomas Jefferson:
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
Viktor Frankl:
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Virginia Woolf:
To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
Wendell Phillips:
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson
Wendy Kaminer:
Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least. [source]
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Bones
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