The
people never give up their liberties but under some
delusion.
-- Edmund Burke
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"Everyone
has a right to peaceful coexistence, the basic
personal freedoms, the alleviation of suffering,
and the opportunity to lead a productive life..."
-- Jimmy
Carter |
The
progress of freedom depends
more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of
commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon
the labours of cabinets and foreign offices.
-- Richard Cobden
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“In
a democracy, the individual enjoys not only
the ultimate power but carries the ultimate
responsibility.”
-- Norman
Cousins |
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"Peace
can only last where human rights are respected,
where the people are fed, and where individuals
and nations are free."
-- 14th
Dalai Lama
Brute
force, no matter how strongly applied, can
never subdue the basic human desire for freedom.
-- Dalai
Lama
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You
can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting
the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I
am free.
-- Clarence Darrow
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Those
who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
agitation, are men who want crops without
plowing up the ground. They want rain without
thunder and lightning; they want the ocean
without the roar of its many waters. The struggle
may be a moral one, or it may be a physical
one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand; it
never has and it never will.
-- Frederick
Douglass, 1857
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Freedom
has its life in the hearts, the actions, the
spirit of men and so it must be daily earned
and refreshed - else like a flower cut from
its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
-- Dwight
D. Eisenhower |
We
must be free not because we claim freedom, but because
we practice it.
-- William Faulkner
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They
that can give up essential liberty to obtain
a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty
nor safety.
-- Benjamin
Franklin |
Liberty
lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies
there, no constitution, no law, no court can save
it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do
much to help it.
-- Judge Learned Hand
Without
free, self-respecting and autonomous citizens
there can be no free and independent nations.
Without internal peace, that is, peace among
citizens and between the citizens and the state,
there can be no guarantee of external peace.
-- Vaclav
Havel |
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The
fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful
in an organized society must consist of an amalgam
of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
-- Samuel Hendel
“We
need to be activating deep democracy because democracy
is fleeting through our fingers, and most people are
unaware of it. Democracy is about dispersing power
among the interconnected people. As a people, we need
to rise to the level of forcing our leaders to abide
by our stated principles - really exercise democracy,
not only on our behalf but on behalf of the world.
We need to continue, as part and parcel of the American
experience created by the founding forefathers, and
now the foremothers, to insist, "We want democracy
to work, and that means every voice counts."
-- Dr. Azizah al-Hibri
We
can enhance democracy by making it in line with
its original vision. Read the dollar bill -
E pluribus unum, out of many, one; novus ordo
seclorum, a new order of the ages. That's democracy.
-- Barbara
Marx Hubbard |
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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 inalienable
rights; that among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. -- Thomas
Jefferson
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When
we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from
every village and every hamlet, from every
state and every city, we will be able to speed
up that day when all of God's children, black
men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants
and Catholics, will be able to join hands
and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
'Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty,
we are free at last!'
-- Martin
Luther King, Jr.
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Those
who deny freedom to others deserve it not
for themselves.
-- Abraham
Lincoln
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Freedom
is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself
the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility
of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not
a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
-- Archibald MacLeish
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“Today's
Constitution is a realistic document of freedom
only because of several corrective amendments.
Those amendments speak to a sense of decency
and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.”
-- Thurgood
Marshall |
Whatever
the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our
safety arising from political suppression are always
greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from
political freedom. Suppression is always foolish.
-- Neil A. McDonald
"Much
violence is based on the illusion that life is a property
to be defended and not to be shared."
-- Henri Nouwen
You
cannot separate peace from freedom because no one
can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
--Malcolm X
There
never was a war that was not inward; I must fight
till I have conquered in myself what causes war.
-- Marianne Moore
We
cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
-- Edward R. Murrow
Here
is my advice as we begin the century that will lead
to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all
costs. Be alert that dictators have always played
on the natural human tendency to blame others and
to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian
of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights
of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered
expression.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081
There
can be no prescription old enough to supersede the
Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has
given to all men a natural right to be free, and they
have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves
so, if they please.
-- James Otis
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He
that would make his own liberty secure, must
guard even his enemy from opposition; for
if he violates this duty he establishes a
precedent that will reach himself.
-- Thomas
Paine
When
people fear the government, there is tyranny.
When government fears the people, there is
liberty.
-- Thomas
Paine
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Anarchism
has but one infallible, unchangeable motto,
"Freedom." Freedom to discover any truth, freedom
to develop, to live naturally and fully.
-- Lucy
Parsons, 1905 |
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Let
us not accept violence as the way of peace. Let us
instead begin by respecting true freedom: the resulting
peace will be able to satisfy the world's expectations,
for it will be a peace built on justice, a peace founded
on the incomparable dignity of the free human being.
-- Pope John Paul II
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"There
can be no Friendship where there is no Freedom."
-- William
Penn
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Freedom
is never granted; it is won. Justice is never
given; it is exacted.
-- A.
Philip Randolph
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There
is no power in the world that can stop the forward
march of free men and women when they are joined in
the solidarity of human brotherhood.
-- Walter Reuther
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"At
all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting
for freedom of religion, freedom of speech,
and freedom from want… for these are things
that must be gained in peace as well as in war."
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt |
In
the future days which we seek to make secure,
we look forward to a world founded upon four
essential human freedoms. The first is freedom
of speech and expression --everywhere in the
world. The second is freedom of every person
to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in
the world. The third is freedom from want, which,
translated into world terms, means economic
understandings which will secure to every nation
a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants
--everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom
from fear, which, translated into world terms,
means a worldwide reduction of armaments to
such a point and in such a thorough fashion
that no nation will be in a position to commit
an act of physical aggression against any neighbor
--anywhere in the world. That is no vision of
a distant millennium. It is a definite basis
for a kind of world attainable in our own time
and generation.
-- Franklin
D. Roosevelt
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Order
without liberty and liberty without order
are equally destructive.
-- Theodore
Roosevelt
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Freedom
is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about
what you can control. Freedom is about what you can
unleash.
-- Harriet Rubin
If
you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to
guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all
your neighbors. There is no other.
-- Carl Schurz
Sometimes
the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly
to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom
to satisfy hunger; or to achieve sufficient nutrition,
or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses or the
opportunity to be adequatley clothed or sheltered,
or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities. In
other cases, the unfreedom links closely to the lack
of public facilities and social care, such as the
absence of epidemiological programs, or of organized
arrangements for the health care or educational facilities,
or of effective insititutions for the maintenance
of local peace and order. In still other cases, the
violation of freedom results directly from a denial
of political and civil liberties by authoritarian
regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom
to participate in the social, political and economic
life of the community.
Amartya Sen
Liberty
is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,...
of searching and experimenting,... of saying No to
any authority - literary, artistic, philosophical,
religious, social, and even political.
-- Ignazio Silone
Every
man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice,
is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest
his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital
into competition with those of any other man or order
of men.
-- Adam Smith
My
definition of a free society is a society where it
is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson
If
we lose our title of "land of the free," what have
we got?
-- Helen Thomas
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The
shallow consider liberty a release from all
law, from every constraint. The wise see in
it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
-- Walt
Whitman
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There
is much to be done, there is much that can be
done… one person of integrity can make a difference,
a difference of life and death. As long as one
dissident is in prison, our freedom will not
be true. As long as one child is hungry, our
lives will be filled with anguish and shame.
What all these victims need above all is to
know that they are not alone; that we are not
forgetting them, that when their voices are
stifled we shall lend them ours, that while
their freedom depends on ours, the quality of
our freedom depends on theirs.
-- Elie
Wiesel |
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Freedom
is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and
fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to
everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they
agree with us or not, no matter what their race or
the color of their skin.
-- Wendell L. Wilkie
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