%start%%quote%All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.//%Author%Albert Einstein//%end%
%start%%quote%Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.//%Author%Aldous Huxley//%end%
%start%%quote%Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.//%Author%Anne Morrow Lindbergh//%end%
%start%%quote%That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing -- the truly democratic thing about it -- is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.//%Author%Barbara Ehrenreich//%end%
%start%%quote%Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.//%Author%C. Wright Mills//%end%
%start%%quote%
A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You're free at last.
//%Author%Charlie Daniels//%Source%Written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.//%end%
%start%%quote%You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.//%Author%Clarence Darrow//%end%
%start%%quote%When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.//%Author%Dorothy Thompson//%end%
%start%%quote%It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.//%Author%Dorothy Thompson//%end%
%start%%quote%Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.//%Author%Dorothy Thompson//%end%
%start%%quote%We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.//%Author%Dwight D. Eisenhower//%end%
%start%%quote%The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.//%Author%Eleanor Holmes Norton//%end%
%start%%quote%We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.//%Author%Epictetus//%Source%Discourses//%end%
%start%%quote%Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.//%Author%Eugene V. Debs//%end%
%start%%quote%The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.//%Author%Franklin Delano Roosevelt//%end%
%start%%quote%True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.//%Author%Franklin Delano Roosevelt//%end%
%start%%quote%Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.//%Author%Frederick Douglass//%end%
%start%%quote%I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.//%Author%H. L. Mencken//%end%
%start%%quote%The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.//%Author%H. L. Mencken//%end%
%start%%quote%Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.//%Author%Henry David Thoreau//%end%
%start%%quote%There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.//%Author%Hodding Carter//%end%
%start%%quote%Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.//%Author%James Baldwin//%end%
%start%%quote%Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.//%Author%Jean-Paul Sartre//%end%
%start%%quote%No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.//%Author%Jesse Jackson//%end%
%start%%quote%There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.//%Author%John Adams//%end%
%start%%quote%The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.
//%Author%John Dewey//%end%
%start%%quote%The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.//%Author%John F. Kennedy//%end%
%start%%quote%Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.//%Author%John F. Kennedy//%end%
%start%%quote%The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.//%Author%John Stuart Mill//%end%
%start%%quote%A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.//%Author%Margaret Sanger//%end%
%start%%quote%And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.//%Author%Marianne Williamson//%end%
%start%%quote%Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.//%Author%Marilyn Ferguson//%end%
%start%%quote%Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.//%Author%Mohandas K. Gandhi//%end%
%start%%quote%It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.//%Author%Molly Ivins//%end%
%start%%quote%For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments.//%Author%Noam Chomsky//%end%
%start%%quote%In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.//%Author%Noam Chomsky//%end%
%start%%quote%There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.//%Author%Peyton Conway March//%end%
%start%%quote%There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom.
The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity.
This second vision is our vision. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies.
//%Author%Rabbi Sherwin Wine//%end%
%start%%quote%For what avail the plough or sail,Or land or life, if freedom fail?//%Author%Ralph Waldo Emerson//%Source%"Boston" Stanza 15//%end%
%start%%quote%Freedom lies in being bold.//%Author%Robert Frost//%end%
%start%%quote%Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.//%Author%Simone Weil//%end%
%start%%quote%A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.//%Author%Thomas Jefferson//%end%
%start%%quote%No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.//%Author%Thomas Jefferson//%end%
%start%%quote%We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.//%Author%Viktor Frankl//%end%
%start%%quote%To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.//%Author%Virginia Woolf//%end%
%start%%quote%The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.//%Author%Virginia Woolf//%end%
%start%%quote%Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.//%Author%Wendell Phillips//%Source%frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson//%end%
%start%%quote%Nothing endures but change.//%Author%Heraclitus//%end%
%start%%quote%I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.//%Author%Caesar Augustus//%end%
%start%%quote%I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.//%Author%Michelangelo//%end%
%start%%quote%I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.//%Author%Napoleon Bonaparte//%end%
%start%%quote%In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.//%Author%Charles de Montesquieu//%end% |
