Freedom Quotes

Freedom is one of those words that everyone values and nobody defines the same way. These quotes explore liberty, independence, autonomy, and the tension between personal freedom and collective responsibility.

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“Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

— Pope John Paul II

More Freedom Quotes

“I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.”

— Anna Quindlen

“The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.”

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

“Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.”

— Nelson Mandela

“I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.”

— Michael J. Fox

“The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order.”

— Ibrahim Babangida

“I love music. It's freedom, a way to deal with pent-up frustration.”

— Ice Cube

“The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.”

— George Eliot

“I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.”

— Roger Ebert

“I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

“Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

“I like the freedom of podcasting. With podcasting you can really mess around with the form and the format. You can do as much time as you like without having to pause for commercials.”

— Adam Carolla

“I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.”

— George McGovern

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