Quotes on Freedom

Set me free from evil passions, and heal my heart of all inordinate affections; that being inwardly cured and thoroughly cleansed, I may be made fit to love, courageous to suffer, steady to persevere.

Liberty has restraints but no frontiers.

As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.

Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself.

How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Freedom exists only with power.

Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.

When you realize that every stressful moment you experience is a gift that points you to your own freedom, life becomes very kind.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

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

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.

All theory is against free will; all experience is for it.

That the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and country.

We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves; that is our only commitment to others.