Quotes About Freedom

If we want to be endowed with rights – real human rights, we have to act with responsibility. We must not be comfortable with rights. We must be comfortable with responsibility.

Critics of home-schooling hate the idea of home-schooling and the freedom from the government school monopoly that it represents. Their attacks on academic success are just a transparent attempt to divert attention from their own failings.

They recognized that they had little as compared to those in the top 10 percent, but they remained Republicans until their death, believing that freedom and self-initiative is the best for them and the country.

great civilization arises. The state encroaches on freedom and demands more power. People take less responsibility for themselves and want more handouts from the government. Taxes go up to pay for the handouts. The size of government explodes and economic growth slows.

If you're forcing and mandating people to act in a certain way, then it's not really "benevolence" or "charity"; it's effectively nothing more than tyranny, and tyranny never produces a well-functioning, happy society.

I believed that was the point of real forgiveness: It was freely given. Grace-filled. Unsolicited.

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

But the true measure of a society's freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.

We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.

To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.

Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.

Above even our physical well-being, a central value is keeping the state out of the private realm—our "persons, houses, papers, and effects," as the Fourth Amendment puts it. We do so precisely because that realm is the crucible of so many of the attributes typically associated with the quality of life—creativity, exploration, intimacy.

Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.

What keeps a person passive and compliant," he explained, "is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don't ultimately matter—money, career, physical safety—you can overcome that fear.

They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone. Even

The Right to Privacy," arguing that robbing someone of their privacy was a crime of a deeply different nature than the theft of a material belonging.

the desire for privacy is shared by us all as an essential, not ancillary, part of what it means to be human. We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.

you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual.

What made the Internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration.

mass surveillance kills dissent in a deeper and more important place as well: in the mind, where the individual trains him- or herself to think only in line with what is expected and demanded.

the true measure of a society's freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.

threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, they were all "doing something wrong": political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

I do not want to live in a world where we have no privacy and no freedom, where the unique value of the Internet is snuffed out,