Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
-- Albert Einstein		 
By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein		 
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.
-- Albert Einstein		 
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking that we have done so far, has created problems we cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.
-- Albert Einstein		 
As the circle of knowledge expands, so does the Sphere of darkness that encompasses it.
-- Albert Einstein		 
How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Force always attracts men of low morality.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The strength of the constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure.
-- Albert Einstein		 
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.  The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein		 
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein		 
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Why does this applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
-- Albert Einstein		 
How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Is it possible to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called "Intelligentzia" that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form upon the printed page.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Free is not the same as free and easy.
-- Larry Eisenberg		 
The free world must now prove itself worthy of its own past.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
It is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom’s defenses are found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
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		 
So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Why are we proud [to be American]? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend -- or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. ... A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. ... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the Divine Rights of the Common Man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
I developed a practice which, so far as I know, I have never violated. The practice is to avoid public mention of any name unless it can be done with favorable intent and connotation; reserve all criticism for the private conference; speak only good in public.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.
-- Joycelyn Elders		 
There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.
-- George Eliot		 
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
-- George Eliot		 
Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
-- George Eliot		 
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
-- T. S. Eliot		 
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
-- T. S. Eliot		 
The sea, as well as the air, is a free and common thing to all; and a particular nation cannot pretend to have the right to the exclusion of all others, without violating the rights of nature and public usage.
-- Elizabeth I		 
I say legalize drugs because I want to see less drug abuse, not more. And I say legalize drugs because I want to see the criminals put out of business.
-- Edward Ellison		 
Everything is backwards;\\ everything is upside down.\\ Doctors destroy health,\\ lawyers destroy justice,\\ universities destroy knowledge,\\ governments destroy freedom,\\ the major media destroy information,\\ and religions destroy spirituality.
-- Michael Ellner		 
The Thirteen States are Thirteen Sovereign bodies.
-- Oliver Ellsworth		 
Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose, they might take my property or confiscate my earnings, what would my family do, how would they survive?' He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty!
-- W. Vaughn Ellsworth		 
Wherever there’s a disagreement among Republicans, I’m for one of those disagreements. I’m all for it. The president’s with Russia? I’m with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, I’m for NATO! Why? [It’s a] wedge. Wedges have to be schisms, schisms have to be divides.
-- Rahm Emanuel		 
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
-- Rahm Emanuel		 
Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
We grant no dukedoms to the few,\\ We hold like rights and shall;\\ Equal on Sunday in the pew,\\ On Monday in the mall.\\ For what avail the plough or sail,\\ Or land, or life, if freedom fail?
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
The less government we have the better - the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Liberty is a slow fruit.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 


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