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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Alexis de Tocqueville5 quotes
Nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1835Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840Despots themselves do not deny that freedom is excellent; only they desire it for themselves alone, and they maintain that everyone else is altogether unworthy of it. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1856Freedom alone substitutes from time to time for the love of material comfort more powerful and more lofty passions; it alone supplies ambition with greater objectives than the acquisition of riches, and creates the light that makes it possible to see and to judge the vices and virtues of mankind. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1856Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1835Edmund Burke5 quotes
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. — Edmund Burke · 1784Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. — Edmund Burke · 1777Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. — Edmund Burke · 1790Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed. — Edmund Burke · 1777The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts. — Edmund Burke · 1777John Stuart Mill5 quotes
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for...is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free. — John Stuart Mill · 1862Liberty consists in doing what one desires. — John Stuart Mill · 1859The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. — John Stuart Mill · 1859Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. — John Stuart Mill · 1859The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way. — John Stuart Mill · 1859Abraham Lincoln4 quotes
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth. — Abraham Lincoln · 1862This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. — Abraham Lincoln · 1859This government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom, and…slavery is an unqualified evil to the negro, to the white man, to the soil, and to the State. — Abraham Lincoln · 1858We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world, by thus fostering Human Slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of Human Freedom. — Abraham Lincoln · 1854Ronald Reagan4 quotes
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. — Ronald Reagan · 1961No arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. — Ronald Reagan · 1981Since the turn of the century, the number of democracies in the world has grown fourfold. Human freedom is on the march, and nowhere more so than in our own hemisphere. Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit. People, worldwide, hunger for the right of self-determination, for those inalienable rights that make for human dignity and progress. — Ronald Reagan · 1985And I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts. — Ronald Reagan · 1989George Orwell3 quotes
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. — George Orwell · 1944The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. — George Orwell · 1949Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. — George Orwell · 1949John Milton3 quotes
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. — John Milton · 1649No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free. — John Milton · 1649Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. — John Milton · 1644Thomas Jefferson3 quotes
The boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never without a wave. — Thomas Jefferson · 1820The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. — Thomas Jefferson · 1787I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. — Thomas Jefferson · 1791Aristotle2 quotes
The basis of a democratic state is liberty. — Aristotle · 350 BCFor 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 the government to the utmost. — Aristotle · 350 BCIsaiah Berlin2 quotes
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. — Isaiah Berlin · 1958Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human. — Isaiah Berlin · 1969James Madison2 quotes
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. — James Madison · 1788The advancement & diffusion of Knowledge, which is the only Guardian of true liberty. — James Madison · 1825Jean-Paul Sartre2 quotes
I am condemned to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943Man, being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and himself as a way of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943John Adams2 quotes
The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible to destroy, the freedom of thinking, speaking and writing. — John Adams · 1765Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right... and a desire to know-but besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded, and envied kind of knowledge. I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers. — John Adams · 1765Louis Brandeis2 quotes
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. — Louis Brandeis · 1928Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. — Louis Brandeis · 1927Milton Friedman2 quotes
History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. — Milton Friedman · 1962Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself...economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom. — Milton Friedman · 1962Nelson Mandela2 quotes
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. — Nelson Mandela · 1985I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken away from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. — Nelson Mandela · 1994Adlai Stevenson1 quote
A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. — Adlai Stevenson · 1952Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn1 quote
You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power-he's free again. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1968Alphonse de Lamartine1 quote
O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name! — Alphonse de Lamartine · 1793Amiri Baraka1 quote
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom. — Amiri Baraka · 1962Aung San Suu Kyi1 quote
Real freedom is freedom from fear, and unless you can live from fear, you cannot live a dignified human life. — Aung San Suu KyiBarry Goldwater1 quote
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! — Barry Goldwater · 1964Baruch Spinoza1 quote
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil. — Baruch Spinoza · 1677Benjamin Cardozo1 quote
Of that freedom one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom. — Benjamin Cardozo · 1937Benjamin Franklin1 quote
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. — Benjamin Franklin · 1755Bill Clinton1 quote
Our greatest strength is the power of our ideas, which are still new in many lands. Across the world we see them embraced, and we rejoice. Our hopes, our hearts, our hands are with those on every continent who are building democracy and freedom. Their cause is America's cause. — Bill Clinton · 1993Charles Sumner1 quote
Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be. — Charles Sumner · 1864Charlotte Bronte1 quote
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will. — Charlotte Bronte · 1847David Hume1 quote
In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty. — David Hume · 1741Desmond Tutu1 quote
You will never be free until we are free. — Desmond Tutu · 1999