Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mahatma Gandhi

No government on earth can make men, who have realized freedom in their hearts, salute against their will.

Mahatma Gandhi

Freedom battles are not fought without paying heavy prices.

Mahatma Gandhi

Freedom received though the efforts of others, however benevolent, cannot be retained when such effort is withdrawn.

Mahatma Gandhi

Freedom of worship, even of public speech, would become a farce if interference became the order of the day.

John Adams

[A] republic . . . [is] a government, in which the property of the public, or people, and of every one of them was secure and protected by law . . . implies liberty; because property cannot be secured unless the man be at liberty to acquire, use or part with it, at his discretion, and unless he have his personal liberty of life and limb, motion and rest, for that purpose.

John Adams

Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

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.

Eric Hoffer

Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.

Eric Hoffer

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.

Eric Hoffer

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

Eric Hoffer

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

James F. Cooper

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

James F. Cooper

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.

James F. Cooper

The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority.

James Anthony Froude

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

Friedrich Schiller

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self reliant enough to be free.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Liberty requires opportunity to make a living--a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives a man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

Luis Bunuel

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

Ludwig van Beethoven

To do good whenever one can, to love liberty above all else, never to deny the truth, even though it be before the throne.

Lucan

The remaining liberty of the world was to be destroyed in the place where it stood.

Lucan

All go free when multitudes offend.