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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:

Whatever restraint is larger than the necessary protection of the party, can be of no benefit to either, it can only be oppressive; and if oppressive, it is, in the eye of the law unreasonable.

Nicholas Conyngham Tindal Horner v. Graves (1831)

Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein (1954)

The whole trouble is that we won't let God help us.

George MacDonald

Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.

William Shakespeare Macbeth (1605)

We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.

Mikhail Bakunin The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (1953)

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

The constructive activities of man take on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Friedrich Hayek Economic Freedom and Representative Government (1973)

While we shall negotiate freely, we shall not negotiate freedom.

John F. Kennedy

Freedom is not license but responsibility.

Bill Moyers

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

Pope John Paul II

I intend no modification of my oft-expressed wish that all men everywhere could be free.

Abraham Lincoln

'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

Then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from Heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield

Why, headstrong liberty is lash'd with woe;
There's nothing, situate under heaven's eye
But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky.

William Shakespeare

I do love
My country's good with a respect more tender,
More holy and profound, than mine own life.

William Shakespeare

Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty.

James A. Garfield Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Bertrand Russell Sceptical Essays (1928)

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

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