Freedom

A hungry man is not a free man.

 

Convictions are prisons.

The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Only the educated are free

I yield to no man—if I may borrow thatmajestic parliamentary phrase—I yield to no man in my belief in the principle of free debate, inside or outside the halls of Congress. The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also, it seems to me, a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal cords.

 

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

 

It is said that this manifesto is more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement.

 

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

 

I . . . probably take the extremest view in favor of free speech, (in which, in the abstract, I have no very enthusiastic belief, though I hope I would die for it).

 

Soldiers! When it is announced that a respected and beloved leader has died for our freedom in the course of a battle, do not grieve, do not lose hope! Observe that anyone who dies for his country is a fortunate man, but death takes what it wants, indiscriminately, in peacetime as well as in war. It is better to die with freedom than without it.

 

What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.

 

We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.

 

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.

Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and to obey.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of dist.

We all make our limits, and we set them further out than we have any right.

 

Freedom is a clear conscience.

The cause of freedom, of the defense of man’s conscience, is indivisible. By defending it in one country, we defend it everywhere in the world.

There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.