Quotes About Freedom

To sound off with a cheerful 'give me liberty or give me death' sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous.

Hannah Arendt

At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt." Who was he to judge? Who was he "to have [his] own thoughts in this matter"? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

The danger of exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology and its [worldview], is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man's capacity to think for the straight-jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne."81

We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.

It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.

Liberties in the sense of civil rights are the results of liberation, but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, whose essence is admission to the public realm and participation in public affairs.

Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public, obviously everybody is free to do with it what he pleases, and this is as it should be. I do not have any quarrel with this. You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it.

Totalitaire overheersing is gericht op de vernietiging van de vrijheid, meer nog, op de eliminatie van de spontaniteit in het algemeen, en geenszins op de beperking, hoe tiranniek ook van de vrijheid. Technisch gesproken blijkt de afwezigheid van enig gezag of hiërarchie in het totalitaire systeem uit het feit dat er tussen de hoogste macht (de Führer) en de onderdanen geen tussenliggende niveaus zijn die elk hun aangepaste deel hebben in het gezag en de gehoorzaamheid.

Hannah Arendt

Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Antisemitism first flared up in Prussia immediately after the defeat by Napoleon in 1807, when the "Reformers" changed the political structure so that the nobility lost its privileges and the middle classes won their freedom to develop.

With the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free, Penguin Books, 2020.

Whatever the French Revolution did and did not achieve—and it did not achieve human equality—it liberated the poor from obscurity, from nonvisibility. What has seemed irrevocable ever since is that those who were devoted to freedom could remain reconciled to a state of affairs in which freedom from want—the freedom to be free—was a privilege of the few.

The word 'revolutionary' can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.

different, demonstrates clearly, I think, not only that the conquest of poverty is a prerequisite for the foundation of freedom, but also that liberation from poverty cannot be dealt with in the same way as liberation from political oppression.

The complexity comes when revolution is concerned with both liberation and freedom, and, since liberation is indeed a condition of freedom—though freedom is by no means a necessary result of liberation—it is difficult to see and say where the desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom, to live a political life, begins.

Needless to add, where men live in truly miserable conditions this passion for freedom is unknown.

The men of the first revolutions, though they knew well enough that liberation had to precede freedom, were still unaware of the fact that such liberation means more than political liberation from absolute and despotic power; that to be free for freedom meant first of all to be free not only from fear but also from want.

First, freedom from fear is a privilege that even the few have enjoyed in only relatively short periods of history, but freedom from want has been the great privilege that has distinguished a very small percentage of mankind throughout the centuries.

La libertad de ser libres significaba ante todo ser libre no solo del temor, sino también de la necesidad

She began to dread the moves but a part of her also itched for them, because it meant that she could stop trying to fit in and simply slip into the place where she belonged: the passenger seat of her father's truck as they barreled down the highway. They

At leve er ikke nok. Solskin, frihed og en lille blomst må man ha