Famous Quotes & Sayings

Fulton J. Sheen

Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

Frank Murphy

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion all have a double aspect - freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Neale Donald Walsch

Your personal freedom to experience yourself and life as you wish is not being limited. Step into your choices and stop telling yourself that you can't, when what you really mean is that you don't want other people to feel the way you think that are going to feel when they see you making the choices you really want to make.

Mike Lee

The USA Freedom Act does not propose that we abandon any and all efforts to analyze telephone data, what we're talking about here is a program that currently contemplates the collection of all data just as a routine matter and the aggregation of all that data in one database. That causes concerns for a lot of people... There's a lot of potential for abuse.

John Adams

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

John Adams

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

John Adams

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

John Adams

[L]iberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

John Adams

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

And should think freedom more to prize, than all the gold in world that is.

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.

Edward Teller

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness.

Edie Brickell

You feel like a prisoner if you don't create. You're jailed up inside of yourself.

Edith Hamilton

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

Eckhart Tolle

When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made "me." That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.

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.

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.

Marcel Proust

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

Joseph Addison

Oh, Liberty! thou goddess heavenly bright! Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight! Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign, And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.

Jose Marti

The dagger plunged in the name of freedom is plunged into the breast of freedom.