logo

Quotes About Freedom

The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself.
~ Joseph Sobran
By today's standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today's U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence..
~ Joseph Sobran
It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.
~ Joseph Stalin
at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the [First] Amendment...the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship. Any attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.
~ Joseph Story
Nothing could be more fearful than losing one's freedom. To be confined. Never to see a golden cloudburst or rivers of sunlight on dark flowers. never to walk your own cultivated furrows. And the memory dangled over his heart like the sword of Damocles.
~ Joseph Wambaugh
Horses and children, I often think, have a lot of the good sense there is in the world.
~ Josephine Demott Robinson
If she were their mother she'd teach them these things are nothing, the clothes and toys and furniture. These things fool people into thinking they must stay where the things are. Leave it all, she'd teach them, even your hopes, and all the dreams of safe, calm places. Go with what is most terrifying, the dizzying empty night and the lonely stars until night slows and you see the whole design. Always choose love over safety if you can tell the difference...
~ Josephine Humphreys
Privacy, precisely because it ensures that we are never fully known to others, provides a shelter for imaginative freedom, curiosity and self-reflection.
~ Josh Cohen
Freedom is the best pizza you could have.
~ Josh Henderson
So. I'll keep dancing in my costumes. Day and night. And I won't sleep as much as I should. And I will drink more than I should. And maybe, as I'm twirling and glittering, playing a retarded game of hide and seek in the middle of an open field, maybe, just maybe, whatever happens next will be bigger, and I will forget that which seems so huge to me right now.
~ Josh Kilmer-Purcell
And then I sagged forward, utterly spent, emptied…light as air. I felt like I could have floated up and out…slipping through the open window and drifting away across the rooftops and satellite dishes and telephone wires…sailing away into the faintly smiling stars.
~ Josh Lanyon
My pastor had told me that forgiveness doesn't mean justifying or condoning what he did, but it would begin the process of freeing me from the past, and it would offer a lost person the opportunity for redemption.
~ Josh McDowell
In the end, mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully it disappears and allows us to fly free.
~ Josh Waitzkin
It was more like when I was little and used to run everywhere for the sheer fun of fast moving.
~ Joshilyn Jackson
Leave New York or the poem will kill you.
~ Joshua Beckman
After having served the State of Israel for 36 months, or 154 weeks, or 1,080 days, they exchanged their drabs for denims, beat their munitions into passports, and shipped beyond the sea to find their fortunes. To find themselves, or the selves they'd been, and to forget the commands that bound them.
~ Joshua Cohen
In 1850, Dr. Samuel Cartwright reported in The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal the discovery of a new disease, which he called drapetomania. Drapetomania was a condition that caused sulkiness, dissatisfaction, and a desire to avoid service. It was used to describe slaves who sought to run away from their servitude: drapetes, the ancient Greek word for "runaway slave," and mania for "excessive energy or activity.
~ Joshua Coleman
Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.' " "Is
~ Joshua Ferris
There was a final reason I didn't want to have a kid. This one I never shared with Connie. I never seriously considered killing myself, but once you have a kid, you take that option off the table. And like I said, options are important.
~ Joshua Ferris
The tale of retreat and evacuation is not a parochial British story, that bit of history that happened before America and Russia joined in. It is the story of the global preservation of freedom, of the prevention of a new dark age. It deserves to be remembered
~ Joshua Levine
As mature men and women we should regard our minds as a true democracy where all kinds of ideas and emotions should be given freedom of speech.
~ Joshua Loth Liebman
birds flew by, As lightly and as free, Ten thousand stars were in the sky, Ten thousand on the sea. For every rippling, dancing wave, That leaped upon the air, Had caught a star in its embrace, And held it trembling there.
~ Joshua Slocum
But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?
~ Joshua Slocum
And he was moved by the contrast with his own condition. A free man, relatively prosperous, just ending five weeks in luxury's lap, and he was quite unhappy. The slaves, treated abominably, at least showed cheer—the appearance of happiness.
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk