Quotes About Freedom

That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I will not say that we may not sooner or later be compelled to meet force by force; but the time has not yet come, and if we are true to ourselves, may never come. Do not mistake that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Therefore let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently till November, and fire ballots at them in return; and by that peaceful policy, I believe we shall ultimately win.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, and all professing to love liberty.

Fourscore and seven years ago...

Aqueles que negam liberdade aos outros não merecem para si mesmos.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine .

He is not my equal in many respects, but in his right to enjoy 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' in his right to put into his mouth the bread that his hands have earned, he is my equal...

We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.

Towering genius...thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.

let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty.

If the do has the can, and the ifs possess the butts, then the has can can the can in the if's butt, and the delicate walnut shell that is the universe shall be sundered, and the Prepositional Pronouns will break free from their shackles, and the when's shall rule the world

being used now, in order to force slavery on to Kansas; for it cannot be done in any other way. [Sensation.] The

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty. And I intend no modification to my oft expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free. (The Prayer of Twenty Millions 1862)

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty... We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. --April 18, 1864 Address at Baltimore

My policy is to have no policy.

Smith believed not that markets make men free but that free men move toward markets. The difference is small but decisive; it is most of what we mean by humanism.

to speak, as Leopold's officials did, of forced laborers as libérés, or "liberated men," was to use language as perverted as that above the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei.

Chekhov, knowing the weight of his own country's history of serfdom, spoke of how Russians must squeeze the slave out of themselves, drop by drop. Russia's continuing troubles show how long and hard a task this is.

The labor leader Eugene V. Debs, for whom Hardie had campaigned years before, left a sickbed in 1918 to give a series of antiwar speeches, for which he, too, was thrown behind bars. The judge told him he might get a lesser sentence if he repented. "Repent?" asked Debs. "Repent? Repent for standing like a man?" Still in his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, in 1920, he would receive nearly a million votes for president on the Socialist ticket.

We should be eternally vigilant against the attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

John Newton had written that he was relieved to have left the trade because "I considered myself as a sort of gaoler or turnkey . . . perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles." But to leave behind a career as a prison guard is one thing; to call for closing all prisons entirely another.

What foreigners saw as insolence, Britons knew as freedom.

A sense of rights can be contagious