Freedom Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Cormac McCarthy

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

Walter Lippmann

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

George H. W. Bush

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of 'justice', but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If 'freedom' becomes 'privilege', the workings of political freedom are broken.

Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.

Bob Bennett (politician)

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

John Ralston Saul

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.

Lawrence Lessig

My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom

Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone.

Margaret Sanger

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.

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

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.

If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creature.

Abraham Lincoln

Freedom, although it has brought [modern man] independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.

… to promote precisely that manner of intellectual freedom that has no place in the regnant philosophical movements.

Theodor W. Adorno

Freedom and life are earned by those alone
Who conquer them each day anew

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

The right to err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of all progress.

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

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.