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:
Less glory is more liberty. When the drum is silent, reason sometimes speaks.
Only a work democracy can create the foundation of genuine freedom.
The liberty of the people, he says, whom power restrains unduly, perishes through liberty.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
Nationalism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject.
We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag, and keep step to the music of the Union.
Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired.
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.