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Independence Day Quotes

Despite the name, this is not a page about the American Fourth of July. It is built from the freedom and patriotism pages, and the writers who turn up come from all over: the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, the Italian anarchist Bruno Filippi, Shakespeare, Anna Quindlen. De Burgos has a line about an invaded nation where today’s battlefield is independence.

A few entries are there because of a keyword, not a mood. Cervantes’s remark about not thrusting his nose into other men’s porridge (Don Quixote, 1605) is about minding your own business. If you want something for a speech, sort by source grade and skip the oddities.

Random quote on Independence Day

Most quoted on independence day:

I never felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier.

John Keats

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

George Santayana The Life of Reason (1905)

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

George Santayana

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

Jean-Paul Sartre The Flies (1943)

Freedom is a universal human desire... and a force for peace and prosperity in the world.

George W. Bush

Our goal is not victory of might but the vindication of right — not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere and, we hope, around the world.

John F. Kennedy

Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote.

Daniel Webster Discourse in Commemoration of Adams and Jefferson (1826)

Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.

Robert G. Ingersoll The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

William O. Douglas

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.

Richard Aldington The Colonel’s Daughter (1931)

Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?

Persius

To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.

Clarence Darrow Arguments in the Case of the Communist Labor Party (1920)

Human freedom and true democracy are identical.

Ernestine Rose Speech at the National Convention of the Women’s National Loyal League (1863)

That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.

Samuel Johnson A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775)

One flag, one land, one heart, one hand,
One Nation evermore!

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell,
And Freedom shrieked—as Kosciusko fell!

Thomas Campbell The Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Nationalism can take on some very ugly shapes. It looks as if as many crimes will be committed in its name as in the name of Religion or of Liberty.

Stanley Baldwin

The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.

Grace Kelly

The liberty of the press is dear to England; the licentiousness of the press is odious to England: the liberty of it can never be so well protected as by beating down the licentiousness.

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon Cuthell's Case (1799)

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