Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Alan Watts

As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

Chogyam Trungpa

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Chogyam Trungpa

When you drop your unnecessary things, you finally can swoop and fly in vast space. It is so blue, so bright, and so nice, so airy and fresh. You can stretch your wings and breathe the air. You can do anything you want. You have experienced cheerfulness and joy, and finally the bliss of freedom occurs in you.

Edward Gibbon

A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince

Arnold J. Toynbee

We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.

Arnold J. Toynbee

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.

Bill Moyers

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

Bertolt Brecht

Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.

Bernard Baruch

The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.

Carol Moseley Braun

Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.

Carlos Castaneda

The third point of reference is freedom of perception; it is intent; it is spirit; the somersault of thought into the miraculous; the act of reaching beyond our boundaries and touching the inconceivable.

Alan K. Simpson

There is no 'slippery slope' toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

Alan Kay

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

Charlotte Bronte

I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.

Charles Sumner

Without security, civilization is cramped and dwarfed. Without security, there can be no freedom. Nor shall I say too much, when I declare that security, guarded of course by its offspring, freedom, is the true end and aim of government.

Charles de Gaulle

History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.

Charles de Gaulle

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

Charles Bradlaugh

Without free speech no search for truth is possible; without free speech progress is checked and the nations no longer march forward toward the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial stays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.

Charles Horton Cooley

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

Charles Horton Cooley

Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not.

Charles Horton Cooley

No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.

Bill Vaughan

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

Madeleine Albright

What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.

William Shakespeare

If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not toalter me.

Niall Ferguson

There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.

What this is all about is freedom and flexibility for the local school community.

When we'd line up for a game, we had the freedom to go play, ... instead of thinking so much.

Byron Katie

There is no thought or situation that you can't put up against inquiry. Every thought, every person, every apparent problem is here for the sake of your freedom.