Freedom quotes
2.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside freedom — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Science has gone a long way toward helping man to free himself from the burden of hard labor; yet, science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. It is up to men to utilize those means to achieve reasonable goals."
"People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live."
"The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action."
"Spiritual experiences and their results are not meant for the individual. They are for the evolution of the whole race."
"Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other."
"A man's happiness consists in the free exercise of his highest faculties."
"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads."
"To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself."
"The very foundation of the living of life lies in the desire of every man to give service to fulfill the needs of his neighbor."
"Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."
"We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held."
"Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own."
"Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man."
"So far as a person thinks; they are free."
"A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes."
"Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free."
"Witness and stand back from Nature, that is the first step to the soul's freedom."
"The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means."
"Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance."
"In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the . . . West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens."
