Freedom Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It'll be the ballot or it'll be the bullet. It'll be liberty or it'll be death. And if you're not ready to pay that price don't use the word freedom in your vocabulary.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons

George Bernard Shaw

What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.

Remark to Ernst Straus

Albert Einstein

A society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Hegel... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. … However,... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?

Theodor W. Adorno

The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.

Michel de Montaigne

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

George Bernard Shaw

For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate for human freedom. Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world's many challenges. But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act. That's what happened in Libya over the course of these last six weeks.

The road to freedom is a difficult, hard road. It always makes for temporary setbacks.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nanda broke down every barrier and won his way to freedom not by brag, not by bluster, but by the purest form of self-suffering.

Won't you help to sing,
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever had,
Redemption songs.

Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.

Benjamin Franklin

Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.

The aim of university education should be to turn out true servants of the people who will live and die for the country's freedom.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

Theodore Roosevelt

There is but one way to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. That is to make its declarations of freedom real; to reach back to the origins of our nation when our message of equality electrified an unfree world, and reaffirm democracy by deeds as bold and daring as the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yes, there will be setbacks and there will be frustrations, and there will be moments of doubt and moments of despair. The currents of history ebb and flow, but over time they flow toward freedom — more people, in every corner of the Earth, standing up and reaching to claim those rights that are universal. And that's why, in the end, our ideals are stronger. And that's why, in the end, our ideals will win.

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

Thomas Jefferson

Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.

Pope John Paul II

Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal. Her giving to man reason and the freedom of the will which depends upon it is clear indication of her purpose. Man accordingly was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out of his own resources.

If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.

I don't like the spirit of socialism – I think freedom is the basis of everything.

Bertrand Russell

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The basis of self-government and freedom requires the development of character and self-restraint and perseverance and the long view. And these are qualities which require many years of training and education.

John F. Kennedy