quotations about freedom
Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Intellectual Slavery
Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Never-Ending Wrong
What we may call the "literature of freedom" has been designed to induce people to escape from or attack those who act to control them aversively. The content of the literature is the philosophy of freedom, but philosophies are among those inner causes which need to be scrutinized. We say that a person behaves in a given way because he possesses a philosophy, but we infer the philosophy from the behavior and therefore cannot use it in any satisfactory way as an explanation, at least until it is in turn explained. The literature of freedom, on the other hand, has a simple objective status. It consists of books, pamphlets, manifestoes, speeches, and other verbal products, designed to induce people to act to free themselves from various kinds of intentional control. It does not impart a philosophy of freedom; it induces people to act.
BURRHUS FREDERIC SKINNER
Beyond Freedom & Dignity
I hated slavery, always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to fan it into a blaze, at any moment. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past troubled me, and I longed to have a future--a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul--whose life and happiness is unceasing progress--what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. I was now not only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to seem to be contented.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
My Bondage and My Freedom
Freedom based on respect for the individual, is an idea whose strength and beauty has remained undimmed down the ages. Other ideas and other words have been twisted and usurped. But freedom resists such treatment. It is the great gift of Western culture to mankind. It remains the driving force of the Western democracies today. It is the source of their strength, of their diversity and of their prosperity.
MARGARET THATCHER
speech accepting Donovan Award, Feb. 28, 1981
No successful political transition can take place without leaders and movements that demand and press for freedom.
FAREED ZAKARIA
The Future of Freedom
Men rattle their chains--to manifest their freedom.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Freedom ... the sauce best beloved by the boyish soul.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Method of Freedom
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide.
MARTIN LUTHER KING
JR., Jul. 17, 1959
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
If a man is not restrained from acting as his will determines, or constrained to act otherwise, then he has liberty, according to common notions of liberty, without taking into the idea that grand contradiction of all, the determinations of a man's free will being the effects of the determinations of his free will.--Nor have men commonly any notion of freedom consisting in indifference. For if so, then it would be agreeable to their notion, that the greater indifference men act with, the more freedom they act with; whereas the reverse is true. He that, in acting, proceeds with the fullest inclination, does what he does with the greatest freedom, according to common sense.
JONATHAN EDWARDS
Freedom of Will
Proving one's freedom will often mean insisting on the most arbitrary, odd, unrepeatable aspects of one's behavior.
ERMANNO BENCIVENGA
Freedom: A Dialogue
Freedom is the illusion of an imprisoned mind.
LEONID S. SUKHORUKOV
All About Everything
True freedom is tolerant. It gives people the right to live and think in new ways.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
The White House Years
Freedom is an elusive concept. Some men hold themselves prisoner even when they have the power to do as they please and go where they choose, while others are free in their hearts, even as shackles restrain them.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Freedom varies in direct relation to group stability. The greater the group stability, the greater the freedom. The reverse proposition also holds. Hence, freedom is an opportunity enjoyed in times and places where public policy as interpreted by public authority leans away from restraint toward a greater number and variety of choices. A gradual or sudden change in the community boundaries, will be reflected in lessened or augmented limitations.
SCOTT NEARING
Freedom: Promise and Menace
Freedom is like air, in the sense that any depletion can be suffocating. At such times, the importance of air is self evident and the same is true of freedom.
TSAI ING-WEN
"Tsai blasts China for covering up Tiananmen Square Incident", Focus Taiwan, June 4, 2019