Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.
~ Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081.
History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.
~ Charles de Gaulle.
And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom.
~ Doris Lessing.
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
~ Mahatma Gandhi.
Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
~ Jeffrey Borenstein.
Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
~ Moshe Dayan.
Freedom means choosing your burden.
~ Hephzibah Menuhin.
Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.
~ Robert Maynard Hutchins.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
~ Simone de Beauvoir.
Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Freedom is not enough.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson.
In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
~ Dick Cheney.
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick.
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,... of searching and experimenting,... of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political.
~ Ignazio Silone,The God That Failed, 1950.
Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law....
~ Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827.
Let freedom never perish in your hands.
~ Joseph Addison.
Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
~ Will Rogers.
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte.
O Liberty...! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?
~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
~ Henrik Ibsen.
Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.
~ Theodore Roosevelt.
People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome.
~ Movie: Serenity - Spoken by (Young) River Tam (Hunter Ansley Wryn).
Sexual liberation, as a slogan, turns out to be another kind of bondage. For a woman it offers orgasm as her ultimate and major fulfillment; it's better than motherhood.
~ Victoria Billings.
There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.
~ Charles Kingsley.
We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.
~ Eric Hoffer.
We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.
~ Felix Frankfurter.
The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
~ Samuel Hendel.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism - ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree.
~ Thomas Campbell.
The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
~ Adlai Stevenson, speech, New York City, 28 August 1952.
We have to call it "freedom": who'd want to die for "a lesser tyranny"?
~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960.
We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want...everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear... anywhere in the world.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
~ William Faulkner.
We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.
~ Robert J. McCracken.
When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
~ Oscar Wilde.
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings.
~ Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 1929.
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
~ H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~ Adlai Stevenson, speech, Detroit, 1952.
Nations grown corrupt
Love bondage more than liberty;
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
~ John Milton.
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
~ Frederick Douglass, speech, Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1883.
Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?
~ Francis Wright, 1828.
You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.
~ Robert Frost.
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
~ Benjamin Franklin. |
