Quotes About Freedom

Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die.

The true essence of freedom is that it can never restrict the freedom of another.

We also want to leave our own area behind, our domestic world so well regulated day to day; we are drawn by the desire no longer to be at home and therefore no longer to be ourselves. We want to interrupt a life where we merely exist, in order to live more.

See, that's what we're like. You're brave and you're not afraid to die, but you're afraid of being late for work. That's how enslaved we are, that's how ingrained it is.

that the whole nation, tired of war, actually only longed for order, quiet, and a little security and bourgeois life. And, secretly it hated the republic, not because it suppressed this wild freedom, but on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely.

Only the man who remains free from all and everything augments and sustains freedom on this earth.

The most just death is that which is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others, but death on ourselves alone. There is nothing to which we should apply ourselves more than this. Reputation has no place here and it is folly to think of it. Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die.

One cannot save the individual in the world, one can only defend the individual in oneself. The spiritual man's highest achievement is always freedom, freedom from people, from opinions, from things, freedom to himself.

La prego, non si disturbi... l'unico diritto umano che alla fine ti resta è quello di crepare come credi... senza essere scocciato dall'aiuto altrui.

To be free of family and familiar surroundings.

And only decades later, when roof and walls fell in upon us, did we realize that the foundations had long since been undermined and that together with the new century the decline of individual freedom in Europe had begun.

He has no defined destination. All roads are open to his "pensée vagabonde".

Solo colui che riesce a mantenere la propria libertà rispetto a tutto e a tutti, conserva e moltiplica la libertà sulla terra.

He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.

She did not want to dominate, but, on the other hand, she would not allow herself to be dominated or even influenced by others.

For the more a man limits himself, the more he is close to the infinite.

La vejez no significa nada más que dejar de sufrir por el pasado.

Siempre que un pueblo recurre a la violencia para arrebatarles la libertad a otros, pierde con ello, en una enigmática venganza, la fuerza portentosa de su propio aislamiento.

In such epochs where the highest values of life—our peace, our independence, our basic rights, all that makes our existence more pure, more beautiful, all that justifies it—are sacrificed to the demon inhabiting a dozen fanatics and ideologues, all the problems of the man who fears for his humanity come down to the same question: how to remain free?

How to remain free? How to preserve the incorruptible lucidity of my spirit faced with all the threats and dangers of sectarian turmoil?

How to escape the tyrannical demands that the state and Church seek to impose on me? How to protect that unique part of my soul against enforced submission to rules and measures dictated from outside?

Inflation, unemployment, the political crises and, not least, the folly of lands abroad, had made the German people restless; a tremendous desire for order animated all circles of the German people, to whom order had always been more important than freedom and justice. And anyone who promised order – even Goethe said that disorder was more distasteful to him than even an injustice – could count on hundreds of thousands of supporters from the start.

Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads. It was necessary for this dark hour to fall, perhaps the darkest in history, to make us realize that freedom is as vital to our soul as breathing to our body.

Und der einzige wirklich beschwingte Glücksmoment, den ich der Schule zu danken habe, wurde der Tag, da ich ihre Tür für immer hinter mir zuschlug.