Quotes About Freedom

What ever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called.

After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself.

if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

The strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.

Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seem good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own happiness in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. John Stuart Mill 1806-1873

liberty consists in doing what one desires

The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.

There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns. [...] A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet?

The à priori presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality.

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.

Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini,5 more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.

over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign".

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty

The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom. Nguyên lý tá»± do không th? quy ??nh anh ta ph?i ???c tá»± do hay không. Nó không bao g?m vi?c tá»± do chuy?n nh??ng quy?n tá»± do c?a mình.