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:
Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.
If someone claims to have free will, ask them, "free from precisely what?"
Sadly, there is a fine line between patriotism and paranoia.
The struggle for liberation was terrible. We were bruised and wounded by colonialism.
Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
Legally, the term liberty means absence of duty, or rather the limit of duty.