Quotes and Sayings About Freedom
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I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy
-- A. J. Liebling -
If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
Freedom is never given; it is won.
-- A. Philip RandolphSource : Keynote speech given at the Second National Negro Congress, 1937.
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Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
-- A. Philip Randolph -
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Yes there's a lady that stands in a harbor for what we believe. And there's a bell that still echoes the price that it cost to be free.
-- Aaron TippinSource : Song: Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly
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You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.
-- Abbie HoffmanSource : Tikkun magazine, July-August 1989.
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Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.
-- Abbie HoffmanSource : Abbie Hoffman (2009). “Revolution for the Hell of It: The Book That Earned Abbie Hoffman a Five-Year Prison Term at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial”, Da Capo Press
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Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.
-- Abbie Hoffman -
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Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.
-- Abdoulaye Wade -
The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within that system of necessary restraints.
-- Abe FortasSource : Abe Fortas (1968). “Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience”
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We hail the return of the day of thy birth, Fair Columbia! washed by the waves of two oceans Where men from the farthest dominions of earth Rear altars to Freedom, and pay their devotions; Where our fathers in fight, nobly strove for the Right, Struck down their fierce foemen or put them to flight; Through the long lapse of ages, that so there might be An asylum for all in the Land of the Free.
-- Abraham ColesSource : Abraham Coles (1880). “The microcosm, and other poems”
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We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
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This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
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As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought
-- Abraham Lincoln -
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
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And then, the negro being doomed, and damned, and forgotten, to everlasting bondage, is the white man quite certain that the tyrant demon will not turn upon him too?
-- Abraham Lincoln -
As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman.
-- Adam Michnik -
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai E. StevensonSource : Adlai E. Stevenson's speech in Detroit, Michigan, October 7, 1952.
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A hungry man is not a free man.
-- Adlai E. StevensonSource : "Hunger battle on food summit menu". www.cnn.com. June 10, 2002.
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We have confused the free with the free and easy.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson -
Tell a lie loud enough and long enough and people will believe it.
-- Adolf Hitler -
Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.
-- Adolf Hitler -
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... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
-- Adrienne Rich -
Silence is so much more productive of wisdom and clarity in thinking.
-- Ajahn Brahm