Human Freedom Quotes - Page 2

• Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

  Frederick Douglass

  Freedom, Patriotic, Men

  Speech, Canandaigua, N.Y., 4 Aug. 1857

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• We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Freedom, Expression, Essentials

  Annual Message to Congress, 6 Jan. 1941 See Roosevelt and Churchill 3

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• We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Life, Positive, Leadership

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.55, Beacon Press

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• None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Wisdom, Powerful, Freedom

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1853). “Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science, and Art”, p.3

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• In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Congress And The President, Giving, Civil War

  Annual Message to Congress, 1 Dec. 1862

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• The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

  Edmund Burke

  Wisdom, Freedom, Giving Up

  Speech at County Meeting of Buckinghamshire, 1784

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• We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment...[it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.

  James Q. Wilson

  Men, Political, Mind

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• Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. - 'Metaphysical Principles of Virtue

  Immanuel Kant

  Adoption, Humanity, Principles

  "Metaphysics of Morals". Book by Immanuel Kant, Part Two : Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, 1797.

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• Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

  Frederick Douglass

  Freedom, Power, Tyrants

  Speech, Canandaigua, N.Y., 4 Aug. 1857

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• In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Attachment, Way, Live Free

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• The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

  Frederick Douglass

  Freedom, Democracies Have, Tyrants

  Frederick Douglass, Philip Sheldon Foner, Yuval Taylor (1999). “Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings”, p.367, Chicago Review Press

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• Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Freedom, Struggle, Mean

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (1995). “The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt”, Gramercy

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• We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Inspiring, Women, 4th Of July

  Declaration of Sentiments, First Woman's Rights

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• In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Congress And The President, Giving, Free Spirit

  Annual Message to Congress, 1 Dec. 1862

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• You can't kill the truth.

  Mira Grant

  Rights, Amnesty International, Justice Truth

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• We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Life, Change, Happiness

  Declaration of Independence (1776).

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• Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

  Robert Kennedy

  Inspirational, Motivational, Change

  Robert F. Kennedy (1998). “Make Gentle the Life of the World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy”, Harcourt

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• There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Success, Peace, Determination

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• Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

  Abraham Lincoln

  4th Of July, Patriotic, America

  Gettysburg Address, Gettysburg, Pa., 19 Nov. 1863.

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• A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

  Karen Armstrong

  Atheist, Creativity, Self

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• It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

  Horace Greeley

  Bible, Reading, Biblical

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• Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Recovery, Justice

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• The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured.

  Suzanne La Follette

  Wine, Men, Rights

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• Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation

  Julia Kristeva

  Fashion, War, Cities

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• Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

  Philip Pullman

  Humble, Stronger, Want

  Philip Pullman (2007). “The subtle knife”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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