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:
A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.
The liberty of the individual ends where it starts to harm the interests of the collective.
The advance of liberty is the path to both a safer and better world.
Freedom, by its nature, cannot be imposed. It must be chosen.
Private profit is often hidden under a careful coating of great patriotism.
Under democracy individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded.
The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty but to have a slave of his own.
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.