quotations about freedom
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 begins between the ears.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.
JOHN MILTON
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
The free man never thinks of escape.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
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
Man is condemned to be free.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Existentialism Is a Humanism
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 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
Man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an "individual," has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.
ERICH FROMM
Escape from Freedom
To be true to one’s own freedom is, in essence, to honor and respect the freedom of all others.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
State of the Union Address, Feb. 2, 1953
The assumption that there must be a core concept of freedom common to all contested conceptions misrepresents the nature of the disputes. Typically, protagonists accuse each other of espousing conceptions which are not conceptions of freedom at all, but which are rather conceptions of power, opportunity, will, self-realization, and so forth. To assume that there is a core concept of freedom common to all conceptions is to assume agreement on at least some essential characteristics of freedom. But, for example, those who regard freedom as essentially "negative" will reject MacCallum's schema as too broad; those who believe that freedom is essentially self-realization will reject it as too narrow.
CHRISTINE SWANTON
Freedom: A Coherence Theory
The best road to progress is freedom's road.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
message to Congress, March 14, 1961
True freedom is always spiritual. It has something to do with your innermost being, which cannot be chained, handcuffed, or put into a jail.
OSHO
Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself
Until we are all free, we are none of us free.
EMMA LAZARUS
An Epistle to the Hebrews
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
The Constitution of Liberty
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.
THE BEATLES
"Come Together", Abbey Road
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
"Introduction: The Missing Ink", Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.
BRUCE BARTON
It's a Good Old World