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:
Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small.
The pride, the glory of Britain, and the direct end of its constitution, is political liberty.
Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free — he is in his own trap.
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.
Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Freedom, diversity and openness are the main features that make Taipei attractive to visitors.
Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.
The whole world seems to live under the banner: “Freedom is wonderful—but only for me.”
Freedom is the opportunity to live your life as you want to live it.