Quotes About Liberty

Eve: I don't understand this word..."Freedom." Does it mean...I do what I want? Sven: Yes. Eve: Then I wouldn't have to kill anymore? Sven: No more killing.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants: it is the creed of slaves. William Pitt Speech to the House of Commons, 1783

In the end, the Declaration was not a rejection of government power in general but rather a condemnation of the British crown for depriving the colonists of the government they needed. In order to reframe the Declaration as something rather different, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty had to edit out much of the document they claimed to champion.

On its final page, the noted painter Arnold Friberg depicted Moses, his arms outstretched, with the Liberty Bell ringing behind him. Across the top of the page ran the same passage from Leviticus used earlier by Spiritual Mobilization: "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, one cannot do without in life. All wants are dispensable as long as one can absent oneself.

If one is going to err, one should err on the side of liberty and freedom.

Elle était libre comme les arbres, comme les vagues du Danube, comme le vent, comme les oiseaux. Elle était Tinka, l'enfant libre d'une race libre, une race qui n'était pas enchaînée par les entrelacs de la civilisation. La seule race qui n'était pas entrée dans le creuset du monde ni devenue un composant de son alliage

Free people can handle liberty because they have developed character through exercising the restraint dictated by their virtues. They are not the slaves of their physical desires; rather, they train their bodies to behave in order to fulfill the higher desires created by their own virtues.

Goddamn, sometimes it hurt to be free.

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.

The price of liberty is labor as well as vigilance.

A people can value nothing more highly than the dignity and liberty of its existence, that it must defend these to the last drop of its blood, so there is no higher duty to fulfil, no higher law to obey, that the shameful blood of cowardly submission can never be erased, that this drop of poisoning in the blood of a nation is passed on to posterity, crippling and eroding the strength of future generations.

This lack of liberty, or rather this slavery to fashion, is one of the idols which attracts a great number of Christians. How much money is sacrificed upon its altar!—without taking into account that so much good could otherwise be done with it. Being poor in spirit means, above all, being unrestrained by what is called fashion; it means freedom.

As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty.

men, incapable of liberty-who cannot stand the terror of the sacred that manifests itself before their open eyes-must turn to mystery, must hide...the...truth.

When we say that human behaviour is unpredictable, we are right, because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves. Our intense sensation of internal liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images which we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us. We are the source of amazement in our own eyes

We are a nation founded on a visionary and, at the time, radical idea. That visionary idea is that every human life has potential, and everyone has the right to fulfill his or her potential. That is what the Founders meant when they wrote "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Yo pensaba que también podía ser heroico escaparse por gusto, sin más, por amor a la libertad y a la alegría—no a la alegría impuesta oficial y mesurada, sino a la carcajada y a la canción que brotan de una fuente cuyas aguas nadie canaliza.

Mott saw anti-slavery, peace, and women's rights as part of the same reform impulse to liberate the individual from the bonds of tradition, custom, and organized religion.

Self-appointed defenders of freedom seem to know nothing of the loss of liberty attendant upon seriously adverse economic conditions. No regimentation is more cruel than that of extreme poverty. The cramped and barren lives of millions of sharecroppers in the southern states, the deplorable conditions in some of the coal-mining areas, the slum districts in almost any large city, are a pitiful contradiction to our boasted 'inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage.

It is consummate folly to tolerate every variety of opinion, on every topic, out of devotion to an abstract "liberty"; for opinion soon finds its expression in action, and the fanatics whom we tolerated will not tolerate us when they have power.

For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn...the day of the dictator is over.

A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.