Freedom Quotes

Today seemed like a good day to get some inspiration about the importance of freedom and a reminder of what freedom means to all of us.

Enjoy!

Maria


Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,... of searching and experimenting,... of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political.
~Ignazio Silone, The God That Failed, 1950


Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree.
~Thomas Campbell


Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
~Napoleon Bonaparte


Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.
~Gerard K. O'Neill


Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
~Abraham Lincoln


I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
~Simone de Beauvoir


My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~Adlai Stevenson, speech, Detroit, 1952


It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
~Author unknown, sometimes attributed to M. Grundler


We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.
~Robert J. McCracken



For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail? ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
~Thomas Paine


In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt


Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
~Moshe Dayan


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


No one is free when others are oppressed.
~Author Unknown



Freedom means choosing your burden.
~Hephzibah Menuhin



Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
~Author Unknown


Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
~Jeffrey Borenstein


Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
~Harry Emerson Fosdick


Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. ~Woodrow Wilson


The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
~Adlai Stevenson, speech, New York City, 28 August 1952


We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. ~William Faulkner


They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
~Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
~Louis D. Brandeis


Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
~Friedrich Nietzsche


Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
~George Bernard Shaw


We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.
~Errico Malatesta


We are free, truly free, when we don't need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.
~Ricardo Flores Magon, 1914


Many politicians are in the habit of laying 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.
~Thomas Macaulay



We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights. ~Felix Frankfurter


No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
~Frederick Douglass, 1883


Let freedom never perish in your hands.
~Joseph Addison


Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?
~Francis Wright, 1828


Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.
~George Washington


I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
~James Madison, 1788


Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
~Will Rogers


Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. ~Mahatma Gandhi


Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. ~Theodore Roosevelt


We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
~Edward R. Murrow


Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
~William Cowper


The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
~Daniel Webster


Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
~Albert Camus


Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
~D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922


I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.
~Author Unknown


The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
~Louis D. Brandeis


Freedom is never free.
~Author Unknown