Famous Quotes & Sayings

Heinrich Heine

Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.

Heinrich Heine

Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time.

Henry Ward Beecher

True obedience is true freedom.

Henry Ward Beecher

A bird in a cage is not half a bird.

Henry James

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.

Henry James

People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.

Helen Thomas

If we lose our title of "land of the free," what have we got?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I always had an aversion to your apostles of freedom; each but sought for himself freedom to do what he liked.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Only law can give us freedom.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Merely to breathe freely does not mean to live.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence; The last result of wisdom stamps it true; He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Democracy does not race, it reaches the finish slowly but surely.

Khalil Gibran

you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?

Khalil Gibran

A man can be free without being great, but no man can be great without being free.

Khalil Gibran

Your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

Khalil Gibran

Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.

Jonathan Swift

I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

Norman Mailer

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

Norman Mailer

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

Norman Mailer

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.

Oscar Arias

The more freedom we enjoy, the greater the responsibility we bear, toward others as well as ourselves.

Origen

Free will is the power of choosing good and evil.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Octavia Butler

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

Mason Cooley

Always late: thus I make you the prisoner of my freedom.

Mason Cooley

Freedom is the moment between sleep and waking before selfhood and the world return.

Michael Collins

I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.

Mencius

To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets.

Mencius

Secure property in hand leads to peace in mind.