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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:

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

Abbie Hoffman

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.

Albert Camus The Rebel (1951)

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Aneurin Bevan In Place of Fear (1952)

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

Friedrich Hayek The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

Without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.

Patrice Lumumba

Freedom is a unique concept that everyone interprets differently.

Dmitry Medvedev

Freedom is nothing but the distance
between the hunter and the hunted

Bei Dao The August Sleepwalker (1990)

Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed.

Milton Mayer They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

After all, it is not the pursuit of happiness but the enlargement of freedom which is socialism's aim.

Richard Crossman

Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.

George Orwell

Our government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Liberty is not an option. It is a human right.

Giannina Braschi

Freedom as a concept sides with those who are struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.

Peter Gelderloos The Failure of Nonviolence (2013)

At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.

Charles de Gaulle

There comes a time when it will be obvious that socialism can only be carried out accompanied by nationalism and antisemitism.

Adolf Hitler

Although the Georgian nationalists do not like Stalin, they have every reason to be thankful to him.

George F. Kennan

Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?

Sheri S. Tepper The Fresco (2000)

We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt Romulus the Great (1956)

There is life after the left. And there is anarchy after anarchism. Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way — better yet, the ways — to a free future.

Bob Black Anarchy after Leftism (1997)

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