Quotes About Freedom

Paradoxically, without self-control you can't be free.

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

I'll riverdance while that's happening, 'cause it seems to be what I naturally do anyway.

I like pressing that emergency button on bus doors to escape.

The tension between enabling and constraining democracy is therefore the heart of democratic constitutionalism.

freedom can be achieved and retained only by sober men who take humanity as it is, not as humanity should be.

Politics is the preoccupation of the quarter-educated," George Gissing wrote near the end of the nineteenth century. To that aphorism we may add, near the end of the twentieth century, "Democracy is the preoccupation of the half-aware." What our age desperately requires is not more mediocrity, but more elevation of spirit, awareness of the eternal source of truth. That failing, order and freedom and justice fall into ruin.

Power can be restrained only by counterbalancing power, Montesquieu reasoned. No man, and no political body or office, ought to possess unchecked power. For the sake of personal liberty and free community, power ought to be divided and hedged. Might this slow the actions of the state? Well, be it so, Montesquieu thought: freedom is better than haste.

It is quite possible for man, in ancient or modern times, to be materially prosperous, and freed from the necessity of choice, and yet servile. It is also possible that he may suffer no outrageous oppression. But he must always lack one thing, this servile man, and that is true manhood, the dignity of man. He remains a child; he never comes into man's birthright, which is the pleasure and the pain of making one's own choices.

In the Middle Ages, as in Classical times, the academy possessed freedom unknown to other bodies and persons because the philosopher, the scholar, and the student were looked upon as men consecrated to the service of the Truth; and that Truth was not simply a purposeless groping after miscellaneous information , but a wisdom to be obtained, however imperfectly, from a teleological search.

The conservative knows that freedom without any restraints may lead to oppression or anarchy, just as government without any restraints may lead to collectivism. But he believes the best and most effective restraint upon anarchic individualism to be obedience to moral law, the private conscience.

To begin with unlimited freedom," Dostoevsky wrote, "is to end with unlimited despotism.

It is ordained," said Burke, "in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters.

La elección es creativa y, por lo tanto, impredecible. Al toparse con una elección predecible, ya no se trata propiamente de una elección.

If I want my people to be free, Americans have to be free.

America will be the first country to become fascist democratically—a process that has begun.

You know, you don't retreat in the defense of freedom. You don't retreat in the defense of moral government and limited government. You don't retreat because people are going to defend bad things.

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.

For individual freedom can come about only, can be conceived only, if there is some sense of security to life.

Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.

No matter where you're from or what you've done, you're never stuck in a particular circumstance, relationship, or cycle unless you say you are.

Rose had enough of standing back and doing nothing. Of being told to sit still and behave and go to work and wear this and say that, of being told what to do by men, and boys, and her mother, and teachers, and bosses, and boyfriends, by the Doctor and the Nestene and everyone in between. Above her, the world was ending. In front of her, the Doctor was dying. At her feet, Mickey was blubbing. Well, to hell with that.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

Dad, I'm not at all sure I can follow you any longer in your simple Christian faith' stated the clergyman's son when he returned from the university for holidays with a fledgling scholar's assured arrogance. The father's black eyes skewered his son, who was 'lost,' as C.S. Lewis put it 'in the invincible ignorance of his intellect.' 'Son,' the father said, 'That is your freedom, your terrible freedom.