The penalty may be removed, the crime is eternal.
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
1. "If my body is enslaved, still my mind is free."
Sophocles, "Fragments"
2. "Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave."
George Bernard Shaw, "Misalliance"
3. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity."
Friedrich Engels
4. "You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."
Malcolm X, "Malcolm X Speaks"
Other categories: Peace and War
5. "The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself."
Saul Alinsky
Other categories: Human
6. "The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free. "
Henry David Thoreau, "Slavery in Massachusetts"
Other categories: Human -:- Law and Crime
7. "My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I am a free citizen."
George Bernard Shaw, "Arms and the Man"
Other categories: Authority, Government
8. "Where liberty dwells there is my country."
Latin proverb
Other categories: Patriotism
9. "A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else."
George Bernard Shaw, "John Bull’s Other Island"
Other categories: History and Nations
10. "Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough."
Karel Čapek
Other categories: Human
11. "Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
Other categories: Authority, Government -:- History and Nations
12. "We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers’ wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death."
John Donne, "Eighty Sermons"
Other categories: Life and Death
13. "The French are nice people. I allow them to sing and to write, and they allow me to do whatever I like."
Jules Mazarin
Other categories: Authority, Government
14. "Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think."
Hannah Arendt
15. "It is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains."
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Aphorisms and Reflections"
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
16. "There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master."
David Herbert Lawrence, "The Plumed Serpent"
17. "The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom—these are the pillars of society."
Henrik Ibsen, "Pillars of Society"
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
18. "A forest bird never wants a cage."
Henrik Ibsen, "The Master Builder"
Other categories: Nature and Animals
19. "I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."
George Orwell, "The Road to Wigan Pier"
20. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
21. "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."
John Adams, "The Adams Family Correspondence"
Other categories: Peace and War -:- Politics and Diplomacy
22. "In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"
James Graham Ballard
Other categories: Normality and Madness
23. "The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitudes."
Victor Frankl
Other categories: Human
24. "My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
Adlai E. Stevenson II
25. "Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."
Mahatma Gandhi
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes
26. "Twelve highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion."
Scottish proverb
Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Patriotism
27. "What we need is not freedom of the press, we need freedom FROM the press."
Oswald Spengler
28. "Slavery is a state of mind that fails to acknowledge the slave's own power."
Gerry Spence
Other categories: Power and Weakness
29. "In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties."
Henri-Frederic Amiel
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
30. "Give me blood and I shall give you freedom."
Subhas Chandra Bose
Other categories: Pain and Tears
31. "It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own."
Herbert Hoover
Other categories: Authority, Government
32. "Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive."
Theodore Roosevelt
Other categories: Authority, Government
33. "The less of one's life one must exchange for money, the more freedom one may enjoy."
Gerry Spence
Other categories: Richness and Money
34. "Freedom can occur only through education."
Friedrich von Schiller
Other categories: Education
35. "The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time."
Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky
Other categories: Various
36. "Before you can break out of prison, you must realize that you are locked up."
(?)
37. "Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery."
William Penn
38. "Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority."
Eric Hoffer
39. "Discipline without freedom is tyranny. Freedom without discipline is chaos."
Cullen Hightower
40. "The enemies of Freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot."
William Ralph Inge (Dean Inge), "End of an Age"
41. "When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest."
Eric Hoffer, "Passionate State of Mind"
Other categories: Human
42. "Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do."
R. G. Collingwood, "Speculum Mentis"
Other categories: Work and Laziness
43. "In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy."
Ivan Illich, "Tools for Conviviality"
Other categories: Envy
44. "Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them."
Ivan Illich, "Deschooling Society"
Other categories: Richness and Money
45. "The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."
Herbert Agar
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
46. "Freedom is participation in power."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Other categories: Power and Weakness
47. "Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better."
Albert Camus
48. "Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being."
William James
Other categories: Life and Death
49. "Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
Abraham Lincoln
50. "Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. "
James Baldwin