Freedom

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 did and it never will.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

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.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.

Must I not serve a long apprenticehood To foreign passages, and in the end, Having my freedom, boast of nothing else But that I was a journeyman to grief?

But now my task is smoothly done: I can fly, or I can run.

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free! They touch our country, and their shackles fall.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone. 1

I see my light come shining From the west unto the east Any day now, any day now I shall be released.

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

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.