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Freedom Quotes When I hear people parrot the rantings of their favorite demagogue (often ironically referred to as a pundit), it brings to mind the words of Soren Kierkegaard, who said, “People hardly ever make use of the freedom that they have, such as freedom of thought. Instead they make due with freedom of speech as compensation." Over the years many great minds have spoken out on freedom -- here are a few of my favorite quotes -- timeless, every one of them: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” - John Adams “If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” - Samuel Adams "A terrorist is a freedom fighter in his own eyes: a freedom fighter is a terrorist in the eyes of his enemy." - Uri Avnery “For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments." - Noam Chomsky “... U.S. international and security policy, rooted in the structure of power in the domestic society, has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call 'the Fifth Freedom,' understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.” - Noam Chomsky “If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.” - Noam Chomsky “A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.” - Ramsey Clark “You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.” - Clarence Darrow “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.” - Benjamin Franklin "Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right." - Mahatma Gandhi “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” - Patrick Henry “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” - Thomas Jefferson “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” - Thomas Jefferson “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” - John F. Kennedy “The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.” - John F. Kennedy “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.” - Somerset Maugham “The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” - H.L. Mencken “I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.” - H.L. Mencken “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” - Edward R. Murrow “Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.” - Jean-Paul Sartre “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” - Henry David Thoreau “So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.” - François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire |
