Famous Quotes & Sayings

Oswald Spengler

Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.

Otto von Bismarck

Laws are like sausages. You sleep far better the less you know about how they are made.

Ossie Davis

It is necessary to stay on the march, to be on the journey, to work for peace wherever we are at all times, because the liberty we cherish, which we would share with the world, demands eternal vigilance.

June Jordan

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

June Jordan

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...

Joyce Meyer

What's real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

Francois Hollande

There are tensions abroad where people don't understand our attachment to the freedom of speech, we've seen the protests, and I would say that in France all beliefs are respected.

Han Suyin

I had to learn that there is more to the human being than material comfort, more than success, more even than national spirit or patriotism. That in any being worthy of being human there is also a demand for justice, for liberty, and that justice needs the evidence of all our lives, liberty is one and indivisible and collective, and no one can talk of justice solely for expediency's sake, nor of liberty while human beings, anywhere else on earth, are still in bondage.

Gustave Courbet

The state is not competent in artistic matters... When the state leaves us free, it will have carried out its duty.

Gustave Courbet

When I am dead, let it be said of me: he belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, and least of all, to any regime except the regime of liberty.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

John Dryden

Freedom which in no other land will thrive, Freedom an English subject's sole prerogative.

John Dryden

I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

Julian Schnabel

You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I've been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don't have any buffers or compromises in them.

Matt Taibbi

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Meg Greenfield

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

Maximilien Robespierre

Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.

Max Stirner

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

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.

John F. Kennedy

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility - I welcome it.

John F. Kennedy

Life in freedom is not easy, and democracy is not perfect.

John F. Kennedy

The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

John F. Kennedy

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.

John F. Kennedy

Our goal is not victory of might but the vindication of right - not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.

Joyce Carol Oates

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Richard Avedon

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

Rose Macaulay

There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.

Rose Macaulay

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

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.