Quotes · Skopia

17 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Nature of freedom✕clear

Letter · Political writing

The boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never without a wave.

Thomas Jefferson

1820

★ 7.3

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

1961

★ 7.0

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

1944

★ 7.0

Speech · Political speech

A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai Stevenson

1952

★ 6.9

Novel · Dystopian fiction

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

Autobiography and memoir

I 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.

Long Walk to Freedom · 1994

★ 3.8

But what is Freedom? Rightly understood, A universal licence to be good.

Hartley Coleridge

1833

★ 3.6

Speech · Philosophical literature · Political literature

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Two Concepts of Liberty · 1958

★ 3.6

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

Pope John Paul II

1995

★ 3.6

Speech · Political speech

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. They claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

1953

★ 3.5

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage. If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free; Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.

Richard Lovelace

To Althea, From Prison · 1649

★ 3.5

There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unjust judge to-day.

1831

★ 3.5

Treatise · Political literature

Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permits.

The Spirit of the Laws · 1748

★ 2.9

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.

John Stuart Mill

On Liberty · 1859

★ 2.2

Real freedom is freedom from fear, and unless you can live from fear, you cannot live a dignified human life.

Aung San Suu Kyi

★ 2.1

Essay · Political literature

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

1962

★ 1.9

Economic literature

Freedom 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

1962

★ 1.9