If your free exercise of your religion requires that I follow its precepts, that is not freedom of religion; that is theocracy.
Sam Harris - Keyword(s): , Religion

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin - Keyword(s): , Safety

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky - Keyword(s): Censorship , Speaking

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell - Keyword(s): , People , Rights

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
Salman Rushdie - Keyword(s): , Ideas , Secular , Religion

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
Arthur Schopenhauer - Keyword(s): Alone , Solitude

Some people's idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
Winston Churchill - Keyword(s): , Speaking , People

Capitalism is against the things that we say we believe in - democracy, freedom of choice, fairness. It's not about any of those things now. It's about protecting the wealthy and legalizing greed.
Michael Moore - Keyword(s): , Democracy , Greed , Choice

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D.H. Lawrence - Keyword(s): , Generations

If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
George Washington - Keyword(s): , Speaking , Silence

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
Thomas Paine - Keyword(s):

It is safer to quote what is written than what is spoken. What a man writes it is fair to presume he believes as a matter of general conviction, but it is not so with what he utters in the freedom of conversation. In that he may only express the feeling of the moment, and not his settled judgment, or matured opinion.
Christian Nestell Bovee - Keyword(s): Quotations , Speaking , Writing

The last of human freedoms - the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.
Viktor E. Frankl - Keyword(s): Ability , Attention , Choice

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.
Jean-Luc Picard - Keyword(s): , Censorship

In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Thomas Jefferson - Keyword(s): , Religion

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.
Jim Morrison - Keyword(s): Ability , Reality

I've learned that fear limits you and your vision. It serves as blinders to what may be just a few steps down the road for you. The journey is valuable, but believing in your talents, your abilities, and your self-worth can empower you to walk down an even brighter path. Transforming fear into freedom - how great is that?
Soledad O'Brien - Keyword(s): Ability , Fear

When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants - that that's our purpose.
Karl Ove Knausgaard - Keyword(s): , Life , Childhood , Adult

Freedom is not enough.
Lyndon B. Johnson - Keyword(s):

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."
Martin Luther King - Keyword(s): Civil Disobedience , Law

Let freedom never perish in your hands.
Joseph Addison - Keyword(s):

Freedom means choosing your burden.
Hephzibah Menuhin - Keyword(s):

Secularism is the only guarantee of religious freedom.
Christopher Hitchens - Keyword(s): Secular , Religion

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
Moshe Dayan - Keyword(s):

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
Wole Soyinka - Keyword(s): , Threat

Free speech is the freedom that safeguards every other freedom.
Sam Harris - Keyword(s): , Speaking

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.
Robert Frost - Keyword(s):

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
Mahatma Gandhi - Keyword(s):

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Keyword(s):

When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition.
Neil Strauss - Keyword(s): Internet , Conformity , Innovation

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner - Keyword(s):

The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree.
Thomas Campbell - Keyword(s):

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.
Eric Hoffer - Keyword(s):

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw - Keyword(s):

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. People get the history they deserve.
Charles de Gaulle - Keyword(s): Conformity

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 - Keyword(s):

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
Winston Churchill - Keyword(s): Justice , Hope , Mercy

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
Woodrow Wilson - Keyword(s):

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them…. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson - Keyword(s): Education , Peace , Information

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Keyword(s):

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt - Keyword(s):

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Ambrose Bierce - Keyword(s): , Imagination

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
Henry Louis Mencken - Keyword(s):

Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?
Francis Wright - Keyword(s):

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.
George Washington - Keyword(s):

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better....
Albert Camus - Keyword(s):

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke - Keyword(s):

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
Jeffrey Borenstein - Keyword(s):

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard - Keyword(s): , Speaking , Thinking

Many politicians lay 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 - Keyword(s): , Politics , Swimming

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln - Keyword(s):

Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.
James A. Garfield - Keyword(s): , Misery , Truth

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers - Keyword(s):

I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
Henry Louis Mencken - Keyword(s): , Laziness , Stress , Work

The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.
Thucydides - Keyword(s): Happiness , Courage , Secret

No one is free when others are oppressed.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Harry Emerson Fosdick - Keyword(s):

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, - Necessity and Free Will.
Thomas Carlyle - Keyword(s):

When the People contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything for their Victory but new Masters.
George Savile - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai Stevenson - Keyword(s):

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

My sole ambition is to rid Mexico of the class that has oppressed her and given the people a chance to know what real liberty means. And if I could bring that about today by giving up my life, I would do it gladly.
Pancho Villa - Keyword(s): Ambition , People

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
Daniel Webster - Keyword(s):

Freedom is never free.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.
Robert Musil - Keyword(s):

The threat or fear of violence should not become an excuse or justification for restricting freedom of speech.
Alan Dershowitz - Keyword(s): , Speaking , Threat

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 - Keyword(s):

To freely bloom - that is my definition of success.
Gerry Spence - Keyword(s): , Success

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers - Keyword(s): , Speaking

Nations grown corrupt love bondage more than liberty; Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
John Milton - Keyword(s):

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
Adlai Stevenson - Keyword(s):

We have to call it "freedom": who'd want to die for "a lesser tyranny"?
Mignon McLaughlin - Keyword(s):

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Louis Dembitz Brandeis - Keyword(s):

It can be a little too easy sometimes to dismiss arguments you don't like as hate speech, or to complain that this or that speaker makes you feel... disrespected. Being offended is not to be confused with a state of grace. It's the occasional price we pay for living in an open society.
Ian McEwan - Keyword(s): , Society , Respect

It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
Anonymous - Keyword(s):

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine - Keyword(s):

We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.
Errico Malatesta - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s):

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 - Keyword(s): America