Freedom

No one who lives in error is free.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

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 government to the utmost.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak .

Life is short, break the rules.

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.

I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.

It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man's.

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

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.

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.

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

If you can dispense with reputation, then you are free from care. Reputation is only a visitor, but reality is here to stay.

The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonizing about alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must.

Taoism is the profoundest nonconformism that has ever been evolved anywhere in the world, at any time in history; essentially it is rebellion.