FREEDOM QUOTES II

quotations about freedom

Freedom quote

Freedom is entirely different from revolt. There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom. You are free and from that centre you act.

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

Freedom from the Known


When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood, and all too often we have acted as though we too believed that it was wealth and abundance which were at stake in the postwar conflict between the "revolutionary" countries in the East and the West. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" was the blessing of America prior to the Revolution, and that its cause was natural abundance under "mild government," and neither political freedom nor the unchained, unbridled "private initiative" of capitalism, which in the absence of natural wealth has led everywhere to unhappiness and mass poverty. Free enterprise, in other words, has been an unmixed blessing only in America, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.

HANNAH ARENDT

On Revolution


What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook L", Aphorisms


The cause of Freedom is the cause of God!

WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES

Edmund Burke


Witness and stand back from Nature, that is the first step to the soul's freedom.

SRI AUROBINDO

The Life Divine


The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains.

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Glimpses


It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

MALCOLM X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X


Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

The Social Contract


For one to be free there must be at least two. Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions: essentially it implies social difference--it presumes and implies the presence of social division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a form of dependence they can aspire to escape.

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN

Freedom


I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom -- that is, in disorganized wildness.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

We


What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.

WILLIAM SHENSTONE

Essays on Men and Manners


The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

LORD ACTON

The History of Freedom in Antiquity


It is the mind of man alone that is the cause of his bondage or freedom.

CHANAKYA

Vridda-Chanakya


To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.

ANDRE GIDE

Autumn Leaves


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

LILLIAN HELLMAN

The Watch on the Rhine


Freedom to reject is the only freedom.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

The Ground Beneath Her Feet


We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

MARTIN LUTHER KING

JR., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," 1963


I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

JOHN DRYDEN

The Conquest of Granada


Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

JOHN DALBERG-ACTON

The History of Freedom in Antiquity


Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clearcut preference for these societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights. We do not seek to intimidate, but it is clear that a world which others can dominate with impunity would be inhospitable to decency and a threat to the well-being of all people.

JIMMY CARTER

Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1977