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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 am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult.

Albert Einstein My Credo (1932)

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

Benjamin Franklin

How does the light of a star set out and plunge into black eternity in its immortal course? The star dies, but the light never dies; such also is the cry of freedom.

Nikos Kazantzakis The Saviors of God (1923)

Freedom is only in the land of dreams, and the beautiful only blooms in song.

Friedrich Schiller

No man is free who is a slave to the flesh.

Seneca the Younger

Such being the happiness of the times, that you may think as you wish, and speak as you think.

Tacitus

Freedom exists only where the people take care of the government.

Woodrow Wilson

The remaining liberty of the world was to be destroyed in the place where it stood.

Lucan

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

Denis Diderot Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (1774)

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

Anthony Kennedy

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.

Thomas Jefferson

When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home.

Winston Churchill

Such is the patriot's boast, where'er we roam,
His first, best country ever is, at home.

Oliver Goldsmith The Traveller (1764)

Freedom and power bring responsibility.

Jawaharlal Nehru A Tryst With Destiny (1947)

There has never been upon the earth a generation of free men and women. It is not yet time to write a creed.

Robert G. Ingersoll The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)

The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.

Simón Bolívar

True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them — the desire to do right — is precisely the same.

Robert E. Lee

Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.

José Martí Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

There are no points of the compass on the chart of true patriotism.

Robert Charles Winthrop Letter to Boston Commercial Club (1879)

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