Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Emile M. Cioran

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.

Emile M. Cioran

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

Ellen Key

The very forces that liberty has set free work against the dangerous consequences of liberty.

Epictetus

What is it that every man seeks? To be secure, to be happy, to do what he pleases without restraint and without compulsion.

Epicurus

Freedom is the greatest fruit of self sufficiency.

Epictetus

Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.

Katharine Graham

News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.

Joseph Cook

Safe popular freedom consists of four things, the diffusion of liberty, of intelligence, of property, and of conscientiousness, and cannot be compounded of any three out of the four.

Joseph de Maistre

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

Langston Hughes

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Langston Hughes

I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

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.

Paul Twitchell

In my soul, I am free.

Paul Wellstone

If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or worship and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God's most precious will. . . . There is no work which men and women can perform, however small, which does not draw from this its power and strength.

Pope John Paul II

Let us not accept violence as the way of peace. Let us instead begin by respecting true freedom: the resulting peace will be able to satisfy the world's expectations, for it will be a peace built on justice, a peace founded on the incomparable dignity of the free human being.

Pope John Paul II

Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.

Pope Francis

May the power of Christ, which brings freedom and service, be felt in so many hearts afflicted by war, persecution and slavery.

Pope Francis

I think both freedom of religion and freedom of expression are both fundamental human rights, everyone has not only the freedom and the right but the obligation to say what Pope Francis thinks for the common good... we have the right to have this freedom openly without offending.

Pete Townshend

I'M FREE! - I'm free, And freedom tastes of reality, I'm free - I'm free, An' I'm waiting for you to follow me.

Thurgood Marshall

Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.