Freedom Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy, but that could change.

We breathed the air of freedom without knowing the language or any person.

In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?

Frédéric Bastiat

I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Charles Kingsley

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Margaret Sanger

The secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom is courage.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

Herbert Marcuse

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

Lawrence Lessig

It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you (a) become really committed to winning, and (b) become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.

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. The peoples of the world are becoming profoundly dissatisfied and are not appeased by the promise of the social-democrats to patch up the State into a new engine of oppression.

Peter Kropotkin

The mere thought of investment in human beings is offensive to some among us. Our values and beliefs inhibit us from looking upon human beings as capital goods, except in slavery, and this we abhor... To treat human beings as wealth that can be augmented by investment runs counter to deeply held values. It seems to reduce man once again to a mere material component, something akin to property. And for man to look upon himself as a capital good, even if it did not impair his freedom, may seem to debase him... (But) by investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choice available to them. It is one way free men can enhance their welfare.

Theodore Schultz

If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America... that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers and poison the fair fruits of freedom.

Your determination, selflessness and courage have brought the freedom struggle towards its fulfillment.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

The essence of mathematics lies entirely in its freedom.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

Jacques Prévert

For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.

John Boyle O'Reilly