Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.
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.
Most quoted on independence day:
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Partial freedom seems to me the most invidious form of slavery.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.
While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.
Where there is seeming contentment with slavery, there is certain treachery to freedom.