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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
-Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
-Hannah Arendt
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"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."
-Charles Austin Beard
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"Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond."
-Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein
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"I tell you I must go! Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?-a machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!"
-Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
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Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?
-Roger Ebert
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My angel, - his name is Freedom,
Choose him to be your king;
He shall cut pathways east and west.
And fend you with his wing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/186302/emerson
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Boston Hymn", "The Atlantic Monthly", February, 1863
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"The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitudes."
-Victor Frankl
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"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.
-Patrick Henry
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You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
-Henrik Ibsen
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"Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes."
-Robert Francis Kennedy
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People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
-Søren Kierkegaard
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Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.
-J. Krishnamurti
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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
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We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by the direction of the people. And this is the simple magic which makes a commonplace routine a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants: the continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate this power, yet retain custody of it.
Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.
-Ronald Reagan, Gubernatorial Inaugural Address, January 5, 1967
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Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
-Ronald Reagan
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One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
-Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930
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The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
-Igor Stravinsky
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I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land . . .
-Harriet Tubman, In "Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People," by Sarah H. Bradford, 1886.
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"It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them."
-Mark Twain
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"Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
-Alice Walker
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"If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you're free -- however free one can be on this planet."
-Theodore White
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“Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.”
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Camino Real
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Books about Freedom
