Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
~ James Baldwin

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
~ Jeffrey Borenstein

The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.
~ Leonid Brezhnev

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
~ Pearl S. Buck

I preach deliverance to others, I tell them there is freedom, while I hear my own chains clang.
~ John Bunyan

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
~ Edmund Burke

The patriot’s blood is the seed of Freedom’s tree.
~ Thomas Campbell

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
~ Albert Camus

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.
~ Hodding Carter

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.
~ Noam Chomsky

A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you.
~ Ramsey Clark

Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves, howe’er contented, never know.
~ William Cowper

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.
~ Clarence Darrow

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
~ Moshe Dayan

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

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.
~ John Dewey

To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Devils

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves.
~ Frederick Douglass

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.
~ Frederick Douglass

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, in an 1883 Civil Rights Mass Meeting speech in Washington, D.C.

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
~ William O. Douglas

As far as your self-control goes, as far goes your freedom.
~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

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

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
~ 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

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Boston” Stanza 15

If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of philosophy.
~ Epictetus

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.
~ Epictetus

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
~ William Faulkner

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
~ Marilyn Ferguson

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

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.
~ Viktor Frankl

Freedom lies in being bold.
~ Robert Frost, in an interview by Bela Kornizer of NBC news on November 23, 1952.

You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
~ Robert Frost

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
~ Lillian Hellman

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

We feel free when we escape – even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.
~ Eric Hoffer

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.
~ Molly Ivins

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.
~ Thomas Jefferson

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.
~ Thomas Jefferson

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
~ Thomas Jefferson

Freedom is like taking a bath — you have to keep doing it every day!
~ Florynce Kennedy

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
~ John F. Kennedy

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.
~ John F. Kennedy

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
~ Søren Kierkegaard

There are two freedoms, the false one where one is free to do what he likes, and the true where a man is free to do what he ought.
~ Charles Kingsley

Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.
~ Russell Kirk, in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 33

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Him that I love, I wish to be free — even from me.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings.
~ Walter Lippmann, in A Preface to Morals

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
~ Rosa Luxemburg

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
~ Thomas Macaulay

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
~ James Madison, in a speech to the Virginia Convention in 1788

We are free, truly free, when we don’t need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.
~ Ricardo Flores Magon, in a speech on May 31, 1914

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.
~ Peyton Conway March

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.
~ Somerset Maugham

We have to call it “freedom”: who’d want to die for “a lesser tyranny”?
~ Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook

Freedom means choosing your burden.
~ Hephzibah Menuhin

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right… 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.
~ John Stuart Mill

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.
~ C. Wright Mills

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
~ Edward R. Murrow

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.
~ Eleanor Holmes Norton

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
~ Thomas Paine

If a man does only what is required of  him, he is a slave.
If a man does more than is required of him, he is a free man.
~ Chinese Proverb

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
~ George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, “Maxims: Liberty and Equality,”

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
~ Carl Shurz

How can you call a man free when his pleasures rule over him.
~ Socrates

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~ Adlai Stevenson, from a speech in Detroit, 1952

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
~ Henry David Thoreau

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.
~ Mark Twain

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
~ Voltaire

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
~ Virginia Woolf

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.
~ Virginia Woolf

No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.
~ John P. Zenger