Freedom

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Outside of this cell we may have our oppressors, yes, but not inside. Here no one oppresses the other. The only thing that seems to disturb me . . . because I’m exhausted, or conditioned, or perverted . . . is that someone wants to be nice to me, without asking anything back for it.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife , it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

Liberal institutions straightway cease to be liberal, as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.

The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.

And nowhere, surely, should we discover more painful and absolute sacrifice. . . . The queen bids farewell to freedom, the light of day. . . . The workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity.

Freiheit ist immer nur Freiheit des anders Denkenden .

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Without freedom there can be no morality.

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

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

Good government is no substitute for self-government.

Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.