Quotes About Freedom

Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you.

The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.

I believe in the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence. I think they both mean the same thing."3

God has given us a conscience superior to all law," said Wendell Phillips. The individual's conscience and the Golden Rule top any written law. There is such a thing as righteous lawbreaking.

cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory.

Though I knew so far as Anarchism was concerned I was backing a lost cause, it didn't seem to matter as every other cause had won at some time but that of the people themselves. At least it threw so a light on any other political persuasion.

Nobody is fit to rule anybody else. It is not alleged that Mankind is perfect, or that merely through his/her natural goodness (or lack of same) he/she should (or should not) be permitted to rule. Rule as such causes abuse. There are no superpeople nor privileged classes who are above 'imperfect Mankind' and are capable or entitled to rule the rest of us. Submission to slavery means surrender of life.

If I can't have a revolution, what is there to dance about.

It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships.

The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.

At headquarters, where everyone lived under the tremendous pressure of responsibility, probably nothing was more welcome than a dictate from above. That meant being freed of a decision and simultaneously being provided with an excuse for failure.

Therefore, the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology…. Consequently this trial must contribute to laying down the ground rules for life in human society. What does my own fate signify, after all that has happened and in comparison with so important a goal?

The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take.

A life had taken shape, after my arrest: for years, I had let it sprout, joyously absurd, naive and shameless. In that life you were never carried off, petted, saved; you stood up straight, in the dark cages of the paddy wagon, or sat up on the hard wooden slats. But in that life, all the same, you could get your kicks in secret in the certainty of each day's routine. My new freedom imprisons and paralyzes me.

I was never a keeper of sheep

The Tejo runs down from Spain And the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal. Everybody knows that. But not many people know the river of my village And where it comes from And where it's going. And so, because it belongs to less people, The river of my village is freer and greater.

Es cierto que uno quizás sea más excéntrico - mañoso - autista que los demás, pero uno está en su derecho.

I don't want to be a prisoner of comfort.

Access to information and freedom of access to it may seem like a fundamental right but there are many people who think, rightly or wrongly, it is for your own good that it is hidden.

The bird of youth flies away and doesn't come back. Fly, boy, fly!

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

just as America was the first modern land where people could practice freedom of religion, perhaps someday America will be a place where we enjoy freedom from religion, and discover true spirituality through the awakening of our higher brain functions.

It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.