Freedom

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.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

The function of freedom is to free somebody else.

Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Everybody has the right to express what he thinks. That, of course, lets the crackpots in. But if you cannot tell a crackpot when you see one, then you ought to be taken in.

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.

The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

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.

Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.

‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

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.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

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.

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

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.

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.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.