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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:

We think we have got freedom of the press. When one millionaire has ten newspapers and ten million people have no newspapers—that is not freedom of the press.

Anastas Mikoyan Traveling With Mikoyan Quote By Quote (1959)

"Thank God, I — I also — am an American!"

Daniel Webster On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (1843)

I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine; every man for himself, and God for us all.

Miguel de Cervantes El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) (1605)

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

Mikhail Bakunin The Philosophy of Bakunin (1953)

I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party.

Erasmus Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni (1523)

Man is created free, and is free, even though born in chains.

Friedrich Schiller

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, Volume I (1835)

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, — to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves.

Samuel Adams Essay published in The Advertiser (1748)

For to save mankind's future freedom, we must face up to any risk that is necessary. We will always seek peace — but we will never surrender.

John F. Kennedy

Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.

Emma Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

Vladimir Lenin

I would not wish to live in a world where I could not express my honest opinions. Men who deny to others the right of speech are not fit to live with honest men.

Robert G. Ingersoll The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Freedom of speech means not only freedom for the views with which you agree but also freedom for the views which you hate and deplore.

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning

If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible.

Wilhelm Reich The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)

The moment you accept God's ordering, that moment your work ceases to be a task, and becomes your calling; you pass from bondage to freedom, from the shadow-land of life into life itself.

Henry Clay Trumbull Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Let freedom be for an idea,
Let freedom be for an action,
Still, let freedom be for a motive!

Ōsugi Sakae

Freedom for me is to live with dignity, and if my dignity and freedom is controlled by a man, I will never be free.

Manal al-Sharif

Freedom is a powerful force, but it does not advance on the wheels of historical inevitability.

George W. Bush

The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.

George Mason

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