Quotes on Freedom

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.

Beware of dreams! And watch your dreams day in, day out, because they are continuously there. You can watch them, and by watching them you will become unidentified with them, you will become a mirror reflecting them. And this brings great freedom. Freedom from dreams is freedom from the world.

Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.

Americans need not fear the federal government because they enjoy the advantage of being armed, which you possess over the people of almost every other nation.

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

It must never be forgotten...that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power.

Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.

I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the Declaration of Independence that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence, I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.

A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

[Oppose] with manly firmness [any] invasions on the rights of the people.

A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

The people must fight for their laws as for their walls.

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.

Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.

The fly that touches honey cannot use it's wings; so too the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins it's freedom and hinders contemplation.

Interdependency follows independence.