Quotes About Freedom

It was the sudden memory of Jane Houlton in the waiting room that caused Olive to walk to the bed—the freedom of that ordinary banter, because Jack, in the doctor's office, had needed her, had given her a place in the world.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

Maybe that means "letting them get away with it" -- but maybe it also means letting *you* get away *from* it.

I learned a long time ago … you can't live other people's lives. We have to make our own decisions, even if we're wrong.

Freedom of the press, or, to be more precise, the benefit of freedom of the press, belongs to everyone – to the citizen as well as the publisher… The crux is not the publisher's 'freedom to print'; it is, rather, the citizen's 'right to know.

Thus, the struggle for peace includes the struggle for freedom and justice for the masses of all countries.

We had four years of world war which the peoples endured only because they were told that their sufferings would free humanity forever from the scourge of war.

The time had come for no more czars. Russia was on the verge of violent revolution; only a complete break from the past, Kerensky insisted, would persuade the masses that a new, more just future was dawning, and that the forces of despotism were now yielding to the forces of freedom.

Knowledge is power—all Scottish philosophers recognized this— and the route to knowledge is through experience. But Reid insisted that that power belonged to every man, regardless of any other attributes. Human progress rests on expanding that capacity to its utmost and to as many people as possible, so that we can all become truly, morally free.

Hoot, Johnie Rousseau mon, what for hae ye sae mony figmangairies? You're a bonny man indeed to mauk siccan a wark; set ye up. Canna ye just live like ither fowk?

Above all, he seems to have taken from Socrates the notion that man's freedom depends completely on the state of our soul, not on some physical or material condition; and on our capacity to endure adversity and to be indifferent to our outward fate.

Dion now encouraged Plato to cleanse Syracuse of her luxuries and vices "and put on her the garment of freedom," along with laws to make the citizens orderly and virtuous. Plato may even have contemplated abolishing private property as he had in the Republic, or at least imposing limits on wealth. Certainly he hoped to train the young Dionysius to become the kind of conscientious ruler a true Platonic state would need to maintain order: in short, a living Philosopher Ruler.

Diogenes's quick wit and, dare we say it, cynical outlook disguised a first-class intellect focused on proving a single principle: that we have to own nothing, absolutely nothing, to be truly free.

For Aquinas as for Aristotle, human freedom boils down to the power to make choices. In the end, the morality of our actions must always be judged by the active will and the intentions behind them. It also implies the freedom to choose good over evil and the mental capacity to know the one from the other (which is why dogs and infants can't commit mortal sins).

For Plato, we find our true freedom only when we find our proper place within the political community. Aristotle, by contrast, concludes that community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around.

If Aristotle had been right and it was man's destiny to be free, if our nature as human beings makes us fit to govern our lives as we see fit, then why is it that everywhere we look human beings are unfree and submit to various forms of tyranny and slavery, including now in Florence? Why did freedom fail, not only in Florence but throughout history—even ancient Greece and Rome?

They were Whigs (Shaftesbury's father had even been founder of the Whig Party), not just because they were strong Protestants but because they believed, contrary to Berkeley, that men were born with a desire to be free, in their own lives and in their political arrangements.

For Aristotle, diversity is the keynote of the free society, and free exchange lies at its heart. In the true (as opposed to the ideal) political community there must be a diversity of social roles

Aristotle's free society is one in which the citizens participate in their government rather than submit to it. All will be rulers in one way or another, at one time or another. "This means some rule, and others are ruled, in turn, as if they had become, for the time being, different persons.

The intellectual tyranny that Newton had seen in the darkest chapters in the history of the medieval Church, he saw repeated in the tyranny of a godless, soulless science. He intended to correct that view and free men's minds for the future.

Man's reason was set free, but he used that freedom to try to dominate everything that now seemed separate from himself and human reason, the so-called Other. Science, law, government, even language itself—all became instruments by which Western man reduced diversity to sameness, spontaneity to uniformity, and difference (defined as the Other) to multiform objects for control, like butterflies in a killing-jar.

Man has freedom to do all he wills," Spencer wrote, "provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man.

If freedom in terms of political liberty was proving to be a dead end in Italy and elsewhere, Plato offered a different path to freedom: freedom through the creative spirit.

All forms of humanism, Heidegger proclaimed, lead inevitably to metaphysics, since they presuppose a human being with a fixed rational nature. Instead of freeing man, the humanist view actually reduces Being's infinite possibilities to the dim, stunted creature of the modern age.