FREEDOM QUOTES IV
quotations about freedom
Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.
WILHELM REICH
Listen
God's work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man's will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
The Constitution of Liberty
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
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
Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.
EDMUND BURKE
speech on conciliation with America, 1775
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1953
Freedom has a scent
Like the top of a new born baby's head
U2
"Miracle Drug"
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
Freedom is sometimes defined as a lack of resistance or restraint. A wheel turns freely if there is very little friction in the bearing, a horse breaks free from the post to which it has been tethered, a man frees himself from the branch on which he has been caught while climbing a tree. Physical restraint is an obvious condition, which seems particularly useful in defining freedom, but with respect to important issues, it is a metaphor and not a very good one. People are indeed controlled by fetters, handcuffs, strait jackets, and the walls of jails and concentration camps, but what may be called behavioral control--the restraint imposed by contingencies of reinforcement--is a very different thing.
BURRHUS FREDERIC SKINNER
Beyond Freedom & Dignity
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
They never fail who die
In a great cause: the block may soak their gore:
Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls--
But still their Spirit walks abroad. Though years
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct
The world at last to Freedom.
LORD BYRON
Marino Faliero
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Strictly Personal
It is like living among snow-capped peaks with clouds wrapped around them and the sun and moon starkly shining over them... Aloneness becomes their companion, their spiritual consort, part of their being. Wherever they go they are alone, whatever they do they are alone. Whether they relate socially with friends or meditate alone ... aloneness is there all the time. That aloneness is freedom, fundamental freedom.
CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
The Myth of 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
I was a dweller amid shadows grim:
Till FREEDOM touched my yearning eyes, and lo!
Life in a shining circle, rounding rose,
As heaven on heaven goes up the jewell'd night.
New floods of passionate life swirl'd at my heart,
Like Ocean-surges rolling round the world:
And FREEDOM was my glittering Bride.
GERALD MASSEY
"To My Wife"
Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?
ALBERT CAMUS
Caligula
It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club