Skip to content

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:

This bill and its vague provisions would constitute a major threat to fundamental rights, particularly freedom of expression and opinion.

Mokhtar Trifi

I believe in people who are fighting for freedom, and I try to give them some hope with my music. It’s my responsibility and my role.

Souad Massi

Nelson turned his blindest eye
On Naples and on liberty.

G. K. Chesterton Poems (1917)

Freedom: An occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

Emil Cioran History and Utopia (1960)

I hate patriotism. I can't stand it, man — makes me fuckin' sick. It's a round world last time I checked.

Bill Hicks Rant in E-Minor (1997)

He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.

Orson Scott Card Homebody (1998)

But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

John Adams

Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Susan Sontag Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

So near at hand is freedom, and is anyone still a slave?

Seneca the Younger

One thing I will add: if I have ever found kindness, it has not been from Liberals; to disengage myself from them was the first act of my freedom.

Mary Shelley

"(…) Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom."

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Peace, gentlemen, it is well known, does not come of its own accord, and neither does freedom. Peace has enemies. Peace must be won by the sword.

John le Carré The Mission Song (2006)

Their demands were limited and practical, and for that reason they successfully initiated a movement that led in the end to yet undreamt-of liberties for all.

G. M. Trevelyan A Shortened History of England (1959)

I du believe with all my soul
In the gret Press's freedom,
To pint the people to the goal
An' in the traces lead 'em.

James Russell Lowell The Biglow Papers (1848)

Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law

Michael Foot

which bloody misbegotten Card takes the liberty of recasting in his own insane tongue. As the bloody bog-rat's just done.

Annie Proulx The Shipping News (1993)

The Amish are exempt from military service due to their belief in “non-resistance.” Why can’t humankind do the same in the name of peace, love, and freedom?

Newton Lee

'Daring with my poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style'

Sidney Lanier

I have come to salvage Elphin's honor and his freedom. Taliesin am I, primary chief bard to Elphin.

Taliesin

Related topics