Freedom Quotes

“The desire of gold is not for gold. It is not the love of much wheat, and wool and household stuff. It is the means of freedom and benefit.”

“Let us leave hurry to slaves.”

“Let every man be master of his time.”

“Tis ever common That men are merriest when they are from home.”

“We are the prisoners of ideas.”

“The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.”

“Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.”

“Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.”

“All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

“I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.”

“O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.”

“Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.”

“I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.”

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I In the cow-slip's bell i lie There I couch when owls do cry”

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

“Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.”

“It is one of the biggest blessing that you can be stupid with your true friends and behave like you shame to do elsewhere”

“Now no way can I stray;Save back to England, all the world's my way.”

“Thou shalt be free As mountain winds: but then exactly do All points of my command.”

“The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty.”

“Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should.”

“Having my freedom, boast of nothing else.”

“So every bondman in his own hand bearsThe power to cancel his captivity.”

“O for a horse with wings!”