Quotes About Freedom

Freedom of teaching and of opinion in book or press is the foundation for the sound and natural development of any people.

Second, the teacher should be given extensive liberty in the selection of the material to be taught and the methods of teaching employed by him. For it is true also of him that pleasure in the shaping of his work is killed by force and exterior pressure.

I believe the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality.

Je refuse de séjourner dans un pays où la liberté politique, la tolérance et l'égalité ne seront pas garanties par la loi. Je maintiendrai cette attitude aussi longtemps que nécessaire. Par liberté politique je comprends la liberté d'exprimer publiquement ou par écrit mon opinion politique, et par tolérance j'entends le respect de toute conviction individuelle.

El Estado es para los hombres y no los hombres para el Estado. Como deber primero del Estado veo la protección del individuo, así como ofrecerle la posibilidad de desarrollar una personalidad creativa.

The state should be our servant and not we its slaves. The state transgresses this commandment when it compels us by force to engage in military and war service, the more so since the object and the effect of this slavish service is to kill people belonging to other countries or interfere with their freedom of development.

Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will

The timid may say, "What is the use? We shall be sent to prison." To them I would reply: Even if only two percent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, as well as urge means other than war of settling international disputes, governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.

A un hombre interiormente libre, y escrupuloso, se le puede destruir, pero no se puede hacer de él ni un esclavo ni una herramienta ciega.

Choice gives you doubts and uncertainties. Therefore, you are always somewhat anxious

Detachment, properly understood, means freedom, inner freedom. And, although it is not a word Jesus used, detachment expresses very well an important element in his spirituality: the ability to let go. In the Christian tradition this has been spoken of as "purity of heart" or as the process of becoming "poor in spirit.

Less glory is more liberty. When the drum is silent, reason sometimes speaks.

A free people, forgetting that it has a soul to be cared for, devotes all its energies to its material advancement. If it makes war, it is to subserve its commercial interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp, and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly.

The freest people, like the freest man, is always in danger of re-lapsing into servitude. Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and consolidate their power.

If his country should be robbed of her liberties, he should still not despair. The protest of the Right against the Fact persists forever.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

Literature is not dogma: it offers questions, not conclusive answers. Libraries are essentially places of intellectual freedom: any constraints imposed upon them are our own. Reading is, or can be, the open-ended means by which we come to know a little more about the world and about ourselves, not through opposition but through recognition of words addressed to us individually, far away, and long ago.

Pero no sólo los gobiernos totalitarios le temen a la lectura. En los patios de las escuelas y en los vestuarios de los clubes deportivos se intimida a los lectores tanto como en los despachos gubernamentales y en las prisiones.

Pero leer en la cama proporciona algo más que entretenimiento; brinda también una peculiar sensación de intimidad. Leer en la cama es un acto egocéntrico, inmóvil, libre de las ordinarias convenciones sociales, invisible para el mundo y que, como tiene lugar entre las sábanas, en el reino de la lascivia y la pereza pecaminosa, comparte algo de la emoción de las cosas prohibidas.

Every day, somewhere in the world, someone attempts (sometimes successfully) to stifle a book... And again and again, empires fall and literature continues.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.

Liberties aren't given, they are taken.

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.