Quotations on FREEDOM (a sampling of a larger group)


collected by Rob Kall

c 1995 Rob Kall

Rob Kall

FUTUREHEALTH

3171 Rail Ave  Trevose PA 19053

215-364-4445

74354, 654@compuserve.com



Please do not copy this list of quotations without first asking
my permission.

A publisher is being sought and any help will be appreciated. I
have not found any collection of quotes on freedom as extensive
as the full version of this one. Any quotes you know of or might
suggest adding to the list would be greatly appreciated.









A man's  happiness consists in the free exercise of his highest
faculties.

Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics



"No man is free who is not master of (commands not) himself."

Epictetus, Encheiridion, c.110



...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of
human freedoms-- to choose one's attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning



There is no freedom unless there is a firm and powerful will to
maintain acknowledged order.

Joubert



Freedom, Happiness, Responsibility or tranquillity can be
frightening, intimidating, overwhelming or awful.

Rob Kall



Freedom is like taking a bath-- you have to keep doing it every
day.

Flo Kennedy



And so, my fellow Americans; ask not what your country can do
for you-- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow
citizens of the world; ask not what America will do for you, but
what together we can do for the freedom of man.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy 1917-1963

Presidential Inaugural Address Jan 20, 1961



In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,--
honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.

Lincoln



"God will not do everything, in order not to deprive us of free
will and the portion of the glory that falls to our lot."

Machiavelli, Niccolo, THE PRINCE, Of the Secretaries of Princes



"It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings
enclose that our happiness can breath in freedom."

Maeterlinck, Maurice, WISDOM and DESTINY



The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be one's own.

Montaigne



A human being is always a prisoner of something. The only real
freedom is within ourselves.

Robert Muller, Most of All, They Taught Me Happiness



In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and
even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.

M. Scott Peck, TRLT



The government of one's self is the only true freedom for the
individual.

Frederick Perthes (in Samuel Smiles CHARACTER



The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch



Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to
the realization of desires.

Bertrand Russell, Freedom, Edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen,



Safire, William

If you don't experience what ultimately becomes the pain of
wearing a tie, you never get to feel the pleasure-- and the
freedom-- of not wearing a tie."

William Safire, NY TImes10-25-90



Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world,
he is responsible for everything he does.

Jean-Paul Sartre



"The free man who lives among those who are ignorant strives as
much as possible to avoid their favors.

Spinoza, Prop. LXX



"Thus the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks
the breast."

Spinoza



The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely
freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

R.L. Stevenson



In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is
only another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized,
free and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the
scriptures and mythologies that delights us-- not learned in the
schools, not refined and polished by art. A truly good book is
something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and
marvelous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or lichen.

Thoreau, Nov. 16, 1850



The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is
courage.

Thucydides



Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a
human soul.

Mark Twain



Self control and freedom are incompatible with weakness.

Vauvenargues



From this hour, freedom!

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary
lines,

Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,

Listening to others, and considering well what they say,

Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds
that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space;

The east and west are mine, and the north and south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought;

I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me;

I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to
me, I would do the same to you.

Whitman, Walt, Song of The Open Road



It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might
think "I'm wrong." The number of people who thought Hitler was
"right" did not make him "right." The same principle should be
applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do
you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million
people think you are?

Frank Zappa, his Autobiography



Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

New Testament, John, viii,32



Man is free the moment he wants to be.

Voltaire, Brutus



A man can be free even within prison walls, Freedom is something
spiritual. Whoever has once had it, can never lose it. There are
some people who are never free outside a prison. The body can be
bound with chains, the spirit never. One's thoughts are free.

Bertolt Brecht, A Penny for the Poor



The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who
is truly free, First, society begins by trying to beat you up.
If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they
finish by loading honors on your head.

Jean Cocteau: Time 9/30/57



It is only men who are free who create the inventions and
intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.

Albert Einstein, Speech at Albert Hall, London



He is free who lives as he chooses.

Epictetus; Discourses



No bad man is free.

Epictetus, Discourses



William Faulkner, Harper's Magazine



Systems political or religious or racial or national-- will not
respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us
because we do.

William Faulkner, Harper's Magazine



The only real security for social well-being is the free
exercise of men's minds.

Harold J. Laski, Authority in the Modern State



In a free world, if we are to remain free, we must maintain,
with our lives, if need be, but surely by our lives, the
opportunity for a man to learn anything.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Journal of the Atomic Scientists, 1956



There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no
place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be
free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for
any evidence, to correct any errors.

J. Robert Oppenheimer,Life, 10/10/1949



He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire
guidance of reason.

Spinoza



A hungry man is not a free man

Adlai Stevenson campaign speech, 1952



Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with deeper fangs
than freedom never endangered.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officilis, bk 2



Freedom is participation in power.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, letter to Atticus



Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to
err.

Ghandi, Saturday Review. 3/1/1959



He only earns his freedom and existence

Who daily conquers them anew.

Goethe,  Faust



In one sense freedom is always in crisis, just as beauty is, and
honor and truth-- all those things which man has made for
himself as a garment against the ever-present blasts of the
barbarian spirit.

August Heckscher: Address, Kenyon College, 4/4/1957



The history of the world is none other than the progress of the
consciousness of freedom.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History



Freedom is that faculty which enlarges the usefulness of all
other faculties.

Immanuel Kant



What is freedom? Freedom is the right to chose: the right to
create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the
possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a
man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

Archibald Macleish, A Declaration of Freedom



I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the
freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of
those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations

James Madison, Address, Virginia Commonwealth, 1788



FREEDOM

The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own
good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive
others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is
the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental
and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each
other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling
each to live as seems good to the rest.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ch. 1, 1859



Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more
glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too
lightly; 'Tis dearness only that gives every thing its value,
Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods; and it
would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as freedom
should not be highly rated.

Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No 1, 12/19/1776



Remember that prosperity can only be for the free, and that
freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the
courage to defend it.

Pericles, Thucydides



Freedom in a democracy is the glory of the state, and therefore,
in a democracy only will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.

Plato



I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

Antoine De St. Exupery, The Wisdom of The Sands



Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.

Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own



The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom,
courage.

Thucydides, funeral speech for Pericles



In the cause of freedom we have to battle for the rights of
people with whom we do not agree; and whom, in many cases, we
may not like,,,, If we do not defend their rights, we endanger
our own.

Harry S. Truman



Freedom is an indivisible word.

Wendell Wilkie



Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every
other man has a right to knock him down for it.

Samuel Johnson, in Boswell's Life of Johnson



Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,
and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Abraham Lincoln, 1859



I Disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death
your right to say it.

S. G. Tallentyre, author, The Friends of Voltaire (oft
attributed to Voltaire)



Freedom exists only where the people take care of the government.

Woodrow Wilson, Speech, 9/4/1912





The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Thomas Jefferson



Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Wendell Phillips, Public Opinion, speech, 1852



FREEDOM

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

George Washington



Felix Frankfurter





Franz Kafka

Soren Kierkegaard

Kris Kristofferson

Emma Lazarus, Inscription on Statue of Liberty



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

Lincoln



None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not
freedom, but license.

John Milton



Toni Morrison

Thomas Paine



Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must...
undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

Thomas Paine



Equality of opportunity is an equal opportunity to prove unequal
talents.

Viscount Samuel



Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Adlai Stevenson



For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these
liberties were once ours.

E.P. Thompson



The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong.

Harry Weinberger



What other liberty is there worth having, if we have not freedom
and peace in our minds,-- if our inmost and most private man is
but a sour and turbid pool.

H.D Thoreau, Journal, 10/26/1853



Liberty is the breath of progress.

R.G. Ingersoll



Abraham Lincoln, address, Baltimore, 4/18/1864

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court, 1889



It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of
irrational fears.

Louis Brandeis, in Supreme Court Decision, Whitney vs.
California, 1927



We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight
of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom
for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that
majority down.

William F. BUckley, Jr., We Want Our Politicians to Be
Hypocrites," Oct 17, 1964, in the Jeweler's Eye, 1968



Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable
condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.

Benjamin N, Cardozo, Supreme Court Opinion, Palko vs.
Connecticut, 1937



Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech to the English Speaking Union,
London, 1944

Milton Friedman & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979



is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than that of face
and stature.

Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1784



Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick.  speech to Committee for the Free World,
Washington, D.C., 1/23/1982



*Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are
more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by
gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by
violent and sudden usurpations.

James Madison, speech at Virginia Convention, 6/26/1788



We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.

Edward R. Murrow, 1954, reporting on Senator Jos. McCarthy.



Our best hope, both of a tolerable political harmony and of an
inner peace, rests upon our ability to observe the limits of
human freedom even while we responsibly exploit its creative
possibilities.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The structure of Nations and Empires, 1959



J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Life mag., 10/10/ 1949



We have plenty of freedom in this country but not a great deal
of independence.

John W. Raper, What This World Needs, 1954



Thoreau, Journal entry, 5/12/1857

H.D Thoreau, Journal, 10/26/1853



Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," Following the
Equator, 1897



The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous
manufactures and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty;
second, liberty; third, liberty.

Henry Ward Beecher, speech, Liverpool, England, 10/16/1863



*Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect
liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their
liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty
lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but
without understanding.

Louis D. Brandeis, supreme court dissenting decision, Olmstead
vs. U.S. 1928



It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.

John C. Calhoun, U.S. senate speech, 1848



Attack another's rights and you destroy your own.

John Jay Chapman, 1897, letter



The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglas, speech, 8/3/1857



The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

W.E.B. DuBois, John Brown, 1909



Emerson, Fate, The Conduct of Life, 1860



They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Ben Franklin, motto of the Historical Review of Pennsylvania,
1759



..extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me
remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no
virtue.

Barry M. Goldwater, speech accepting Republican presidential
nomination,  7/16/1964



Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 1775

Patrick Henry, Give me liberty or give me death speech, 3/23/1775



We have done everything that could be done to avert the storm
which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have
remonstrated;  we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves
before the throne and have implored its interposition to arrest
the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament.

...there is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free;
if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges
for which we have been so long contending; if we mean not basely
to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long
engaged. and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon,
until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained: we
must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight!! An appeal to arms
and to the God of hosts is al that is left us.

*       They tell us, sir, that we are weak, unable to cope with so
formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger. Will it
be the next week or next year? Will it be when we are totally
disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every
house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction?
Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying on
our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our
enemies shall bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we
make a proper use of those means which the God of nature has
placed in our power.

Patrick Henry, Give me liberty or give me death speech, 3/23/1775



*The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the
vigilant. the active, the brave.

Patrick Henry, Give me liberty or give me death speech, 3/23/1775



There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains
are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston.
The war is inevitable-- and let it come.

Patrick Henry, Give me liberty or give me death speech, 3/23/1775



Who then is free? The wise man who can command his self and his
passions, who fears not poverty, nor death, nor chains, who
bravely resists his appetites and scorns ambition, who relies
wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all
been rounded and polished, so that nothing from outside can rest
on the polished surface, and against whom fortune in her onset
is ever defeated..

Horace



Liberty: 1. A password in universal use, and hence of no value.
2. The slogan of a party or sect that seeks to enslave some
other party or sect.

Elbert Hubbard, Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923



The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the
blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. Wm, S. Smith, 11/13/1787



*The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and
government to gain ground.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. Edward Carrington, 5/27/1788



The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter, 10/20/1820



Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once
more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate
of autocracy and the twin brother of tyranny.

Otto Kahn,  speech, 1/14/1918



Liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning
without liberty is always in vain.

J.F. Kennedy, speech, 3/18/1963



All government, of course, is against liberty.

H.L. Mencken



He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his
enemy from oppression.

Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government,
1795



When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force,
When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be
recovered.

Dorothy Thompson, 8/1958



Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court, 1889

George Washington, letter to James Madison, 3/2/1788

Daniel Webster, 5/10/1847



To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
Resist much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

Once fully enslaved, no nation, no state, city of

  this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

Walt Whitman, To the States, 1860



Happiness must be achieved through liberty rather than in spite
of liberty.

Wendell Willkie, Republican Presidential Nomination acceptance
speech, , 8/17/1940



Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always
come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a
history of resistance, The history of liberty is a history of
limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Woodrow Wilson, speech, 9/9/1912



Every generation must wage a new war for freedom against new
forces that seek through new devices to enslave mankind.

Conference for Progressive Political Action, platform, 1924



In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress
order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product
of order.

Will Durant, in Nelson Rockefeller, Unity, Freedom and Peace; A
blueprint for tomorrow, 1968



Don't put no restrictions on da people. Leave 'em ta hell alone.

Jimmy Durante



Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be
demanded by the oppressed.

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968





Some of the authors of the quotations in the full freeedom
collection:

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Einstein

Timothy Leary, Foreword To Watts' Joyous Cosmology

Schofield, Major General John M. (bronze tablet on  a West Point
barracks.

Eduard Shevradnadze, The Future Belongs To Freedom 1991

Spinoza

R.L. Stevenson, Truth of Intercourse  1879

de Tocqueville The old Regime & the French Revolution

George Will, commenting on end of Soviet Union

Archibald Macleish, A Declaration of Freedom

Alexander Pushkin, The Decembrists

F.D. Roosevelt, 3rd inaugural, 1/20/1941

Bible New Testament, II Corinthians, III, 17

Andrew Jackson

William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man, 1883

Louis D. Brandeis, Supreme Court opinion, Whitney vs, Cal. 1927

T.S. ELliot, The Family Reunion, 1939

Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

Adam Clayon Powell, Keep the Faith Baby!, 1967

Margaret Chase Smith, speech, 6/7/1953

Hubert H. Humphrey, The Cause of Mankind, 1964

Thomas Jefferson. A summary View of the Right of British
America, 1774

Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Monroe, 6/17/1785

Heinrich Heine, Germany to Luther, 1834

Robert Frost, quoted in Time Magazine