Quotes About Freedom

Religion is the most fragile of all freedoms. And that's because it is the most threatening to those in power.

Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. —HEINRICH HEINE

God is free not from human beings but for them.

Tocqueville put it as bluntly as Franklin or Adams had, writing: "Liberty cannot be established without morality.

What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia.

America in the twenty-first century has generally returned to the worldview of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment rationalists, who were so appalled at the religious wars of the previous century that they recoiled from all religion, unable to fathom a world in which religion and freedom could be mutually supporting.

Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.

Heinrich Heine wrote the chilling words: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." Heine was a German Jew who converted to Christianity, and his words were a grim prophecy, meaning, "Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too." That

Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

that country where they wouldn't be told what to think or how to live or even whether or how to worship.

Christians were free, but he also made it clear that their freedom made them duty-bound to behave well toward others. Christian truth was eleven parts paradox out of ten. This was its essentially mysterious and glorious nature.

They understood that freedom was not merely the freedom to be left alone; it was the freedom to do what was right.

Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.

The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.

It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God's freedom.

Describing Bonhoeffer's demeanor on returning to danger in Germany rather than safety in America, with "with a strong and joyful firmness such as only arises out of realized freedom.

Life is the path. Can the path be seen? Observe the path and you are far from it. Without observation how can one know they are on the path? The path cannot be seen, nor can it not be unseen. Perception is delusion; abstraction is nonsensical. Your path is freedom. Name it and it vanishes.

One of the great artists of this period, Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: "We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting." In their attempt to

Every free-born American has a right to name his own necessities.

Top-down tends to be good practice when three preconditions are true: (a) you can specify in advance precisely what the program is to do, (b) the specification is unlikely to change significantly during implementation, and (c) you have a lot of freedom in choosing, at a low level, how the program is to get that job done.

By a declaration, liberty is born. With courage she is nourished, and with unceasing commitment she is guarded.

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness.

If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny." —THOMAS JEFFERSON

change begins with freedom from the past.