Famous Quotes & Sayings

William James

Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

William James

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

Will Durant

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.

Sarah Addison Allen

I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.

William Ellery Channing

The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues.

William Ellery Channing

Progress, the growth of power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.

William Ellery Channing

Knowledge is essential to freedom.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

Ronald Reagan

Law and freedom must be indivisible partners. For without law, there can be no freedom, only choas and disorder; and without freedom, law is but a cynical veneer for injustice and oppression.

Ronald Reagan

. . . I hope that when you're my age, you'll be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom, we lived lives that were a statement, not an apology.

Ronald Reagan

We've been blessed with the opportunity to stand for something - for liberty and freedom and fairness. And these are things worth fighting for, worth devoting our lives to.

Ronald Reagan

Once people who have been deprived of basic freedom taste a little of it, they want all of it.

Ronald Reagan

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

Ronald Reagan

But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind - too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

Ronald Reagan

Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.

Ronald Reagan

If there's one observation that rings true in today's changing world, it is that freedom and peace go hand in hand.

Ronald Reagan

Two Soviets . . . were talking to each other. And one of them asked, "What's the difference between the Soviet Constitution and the United States Constitution?" And the other one said, "That's easy. The Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of gathering. The American Constitution guarantees freedom after speech and freedom after gathering."

Ronald Reagan

Peace is more than just an absence of war. True peace is justice, true peace is freedom, and true peace dictates the recognition of human rights.

Ronald Reagan

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Ronald Reagan

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.

Robinson Jeffers

And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom. You did not say "en masse," you said "independence." But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

Rob Kampia

The first amendment protects free speech, but if you don't have freedom of thought, do you really have freedom of speech?

Richard P. Feynman

It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

Richard Avedon

Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.

Thomas Sowell

Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people-namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.

Thomas Sowell

We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.

Robert Kennedy

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Robert Kennedy

The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.

Robert Kennedy

The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.

Richard M. Nixon

Yet we can maintain a free society only if we recognize that in a free society no one can win all the time. No one can have his own way all the time, and no one is right all the time.

Roald Dahl

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

Saul Bellow

One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.

Roger Ebert

Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?