Best 5891 quotes in «freedom quotes» category

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any

I do not want to see any of the people cringing supplicants for the favor of the Government, when they should all be independent masters of their own destiny.

I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom.

If an individual agrees with everybody, he lacks conviction; if he likes everybody and is everybody's friend, he is indifferent to one and all.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.

If business is going to continue to sell through the decades, it must also promote an understanding of what made those products possible, what is necessary to a free market, and what our free market means to the individual liberty of each of us, to be certain that the freedoms under which this nation was born and brought to this point shall endure in the future ... for America is the product of our freedoms.

If everything is noted, all your emotional difficulties will disappear. When you feel happy, don't get involved in happiness. When you feel sad, don't get involved with it. Whatever comes, don't worry, just be aware of it.

If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?

If fame came near to you to get you, you must run away from it very fast! Because this is a matter of freedom and captivity!

if I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?

If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not toalter me.

I find freedom to be the most important issue facing any human being today, because without freedom, then life is pointless. The more dependent you become on centralized power, the more easily you are lead around.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.

If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control - myself.

If mankind is to profit freely from the small and sporadic crop of the heroically gifted it produces, it will have to cultivate the delicate art of handling ideas. Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable art disguise itself as caution, or sanity, or reasoned skepticism, or on occasion even as courage.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?

If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the other qualities which enoble the character of a nation, and fulfill the ends of Government be the fruits of our establishments, the cause of liberty will acquire a dignity and lustre, which it has never yet enjoyed, and an example will be set, which can not but have the most favorable influence on the rights of Mankind.

I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

If somebody else is making the rules for you, no matter how good the payoff is for you, you're being conned.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.

If the layman cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite. ... [The fundamental question becomes] are we still capable of self-government and therefore freedom? Margaret Mead wrote in a 1959 issue of Daedalus about scientists elevated to the status of priests. Now there is a name for this elevation, when you are in the hands of-one hopes-a benevolent elite, when you have no control over your political decisions. From the point of view of John Locke, the name for this is slavery.

If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.

If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

If the women of the United States, with their free schools and all their enlarged liberties, are not superior to women brought upunder monarchical forms of government, then there is no good in liberty.

If this spirit shall ever be so far debased, as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.

If we are free from attachment, we can easily recognize ourselves in other people, in different forms of manifestation, and then we don't have to suffer.

If we advert to the nature of republican government, we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.

If we lose our title of "land of the free," what have we got?

If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails.

If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.

If we want spiritual development, the practice of patience is essential.

If yet your blood does not rage, then it is water that flows in your veins. For what is the flush of youth, if it is not of service to the motherland.

If we can implant in our people the Christian virtues which we sum up in the word character, and, at the same time, give them a knowledge of the line which should be drawn between voluntary action and governmental compulsion in a democracy, and of what can be accomplished within the stern laws of economics, we will enable them to retain their freedom, and at the same time, make them worthy to be free.

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.

If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself.

If you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

If you are called upon to govern humans, treat them humanely.

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

If you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate.

If you give the government the right to determine the consumption of the human body, to determine whether one should smoke or not smoke, drink or not drink, there is no good reply you can give to people who say, More important than the body is the mind and the soul, and man hurts himself much more by reading bad books, by listening to bad music and looking at bad movies. Therefore it is the duty of the government to prevent people from committing those faults. And, as you know, for many hundreds of years governments and authorities velieved that it was their duty.