Selected freedom quotes

1. Mine to the core of the heart, my beauty! Mine, all mine, and for love, not duty: Love given willingly, full and free, Love for love's sake - as mine to thee. Duty's a slave that keeps the keys, But Love, the master, goes in and out Of his goodly chambers with song and shout, Just as he please - just as he please.

2. Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

3. According to Buddhism, individuals are masters of their own destiny. And all living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?

4. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. True peace with oneself and with the world around us can only be achieved through the development of mental peace.

5. Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

6. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

7. America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

8. What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

9. If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower.

10. In this world him who does not abandon himself the Almighty will not desert. Him who helps himself will the Almighty always also help; He will show him the way by which he can gain his rights, his freedom, and therefore his future.

11. It's in the private places of the heart that freedom is made or unmade by the discipline we create there.

12. There can be no self-government without self-discipline. There can be no self-government without self-control. There can be no liberty unless it is grounded in moral discipline and the ability to do what is right.

13. The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master. It's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity.

14. How does it secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity, to those generations yet unborn, to kill them, aborting them in the womb?

15. At the root of the assault on our liberties is, in fact, an assault on our character--an assault that assumes that we are not good enough to be free, and that aims to make sure that we are no longer strong enough, courageous enough, disciplined enough to be a free people.

16. We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes--and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench.

17. We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

18. A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

19. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

20. No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

21. The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.

22. We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

23. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralisation of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

24. Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

25. I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.

26. Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.

27. Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

28. I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

29. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

30. Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones.

31. Remember, America: organization will set you free.

32. Now that I'm out and I'm shouting in doorways Freed from a love more like murder I should be singing but in liberation Feel like a ship with no rudder.

33. Art is what you can get away with.

34. Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

35. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.

36. Would that it were so! ... That the American military were targeting journalists.

37. He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.

38. Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

39. What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

40. The essence of a democracy is a free electorate.

41. If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails.

42. Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you.

43. For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

44. We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

45. We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

46. Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

47. I put in my list all the busy, useful independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.

48. Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?

49. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

50. The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.

51. All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.

52. You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

53. Let your children go if you want to keep them.

54. It should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.

55. Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

56. Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man's equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.

57. Has knowledge of birth control, so carefully guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class - and so tenaciously withheld from the working women - brought them misery? Rather, has it not promoted greater happiness, greater freedom, greater prosperity and more harmony among them? The women who have this knowledge are the women who have been free to develop, free to enjoy in its best sense, and free to advance the interests of the community.

58. If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it.

59. What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.

60. Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.

61. Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

62. There's a line in the picture where he snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

63. Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite.

64. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

65. It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

66. The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

67. We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.

68. Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free. A Brave and Startling Truth.

69. I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

70. Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

71. We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.

72. The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

73. A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

74. Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

75. God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.

76. Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.

77. If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

78. Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.

79. Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.

80. The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.

81. Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

82. As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

83. A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

84. What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory.

85. I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

86. Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.

87. I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want.

88. Freedom and independence is my character.

89. Where there is no freedom, there is death and destruction.

90. What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

91. A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

92. A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strength to tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom. I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist, a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down; it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees. Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

93. If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

94. Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

95. Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it.

96. The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.

97. If we wish to be free; if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending; if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained - we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms, and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us.

98. Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

99. I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.

100. Twenty-five years ago I couldn't walk down the street without being recognized. Now I can put a cap on, walk anywhere and no one pays me any attention. They don't ask me about my movies and they don't ask me about my salad dressing because they don't know who I am. Am I happy about this? You bet.