Freedom Quotes
Presidents are over-represented here. George W. Bush has the most entries, ahead of Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy, which says more about how often presidents talk about freedom than about how well they put it. The better writing tends to be elsewhere: Madison in the Federalist Papers (1787), Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958), Dalí in his diary.
Two of the most repeated freedom quotes are flagged. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is credited to Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote it in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), as a summary of his views. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is credited to Jefferson, but nobody has found it in his writings. The closest early version is by John Philpot Curran, in a speech of 1790.
We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small.
The pride, the glory of Britain, and the direct end of its constitution, is political liberty.
Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free — he is in his own trap.
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Freedom, diversity and openness are the main features that make Taipei attractive to visitors.
Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.
The whole world seems to live under the banner: “Freedom is wonderful—but only for me.”
Freedom is the opportunity to live your life as you want to live it.