Philosopher Quotes on Freedom

“Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

VII, 11.

“From Apollonius , true liberty, and unvariable steadfastness, and not to regard anything at all, though never so little, but right and reason: and always..that it was possible for the same man to be both vehement and remiss: a man not subject to be vexed, and offended with the incapacity of his scholars and auditors in his lectures and expositions.”

I, 5

“Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love. (Hays translation)”

I, 9

“To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.”

Meditations, Book VIII | Remember that to change thy opinion and to follow him who corrects thy error is as consistent with freedom as it is to persist in thy error. (Long translation) VIII, 16

“Existence precedes essence.”

L'existence précède et commande l'essence.

“Man is condemned to be free.”

Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

p. 41

“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”

L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous.

“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom .”

L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique ) (1936)

“I rebel; therefore we exist.”

The Rebel (L'Homme Revolte), 1951

“What is a rebel? A man who says no.”

Chapter 1

“To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.”

Absurd Creation | Kirilov

“Absolute freedom mocks at justice . Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

The Rebel(1951) | "Historical Murder", as translated by Anthony Bower

“Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.”

The Rebel(1951) | Part 2: Metaphysical Rebellion

“Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”

1900s | Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902

“It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.”

Sceptical Essays(1928) | Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda

“I don't like the spirit of socialism – I think freedom is the basis of everything.”

1910s | Letter to Constance Malleson (Colette), September 29, 1916

“One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.”

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism(1920) | Part I, Ch. 9: International Policy

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”

Sceptical Essays(1928) | Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda

“The Fugitive Slave Law , a lecture in NYC (March 7, 1854)”

Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

“The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”

Journals (1822–1863) | February 12, 1851; cf. the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson , " Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in Boswell 's Life of Johnson (1791)

“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”

Journals (1822–1863) | June 27, 1839

Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

“In the interval between his campaigns Agricola was employed in the great labours of peace. He knew that the general must be perfected by the legislator; and that the conquest is neither permanent nor honourable, which is only an introduction to tyranny... In short, he subdued the Britons by civilizing them; and made them exchange a savage liberty for a polite and easy subjection. His conduct is the most perfect model for those employed in the unhappy, but sometimes necessary, task of subduing a rude and free people.”

An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 215

“I could show, that the same faction has, in one reign, promoted popular seditions, and, in the next, been a patron of tyranny; I could show, that they have all of them betrayed the public safety at all times, and have very frequently with equal perfidy made a market of their own cause, and their own associates. I could show how vehemently they have contended for names, and how silently they have passed over things of the last importance.”

Wikiquote

“We scarce ever had a prince, who by fraud, or violence, had not made some infringement on the constitution. We scarce ever had a parliament which knew, when it attempted to set limits to the royal authority, how to set limits to its own. Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils. Our boasted liberty sometimes trodden down, sometimes giddily set up, and ever precariously fluctuating and unsettled; it has only been kept alive by the blasts of continual feuds, wars, and conspiracies.”

Wikiquote

“People must be governed in a manner agreeable to their temper and disposition; and men of free character and spirit must be ruled with, at least, some condescension to this spirit and this character.”

1760s | Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 76.

“He was one of those who wished for the abolition of the Slave Trade . He thought it ought to be abolished on principles of humanity and justice.”

1780s | Speech in the House of Commons (9 May 1788), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVII (1816), column 502

“Arise, awake, and stop not until the goal is reached.”

Public Addresses

“All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.”

Raja Yoga

“Go on saying, “I am free.” Never mind if the next moment delusion comes and says, “I am bound.” Dehypnotize the whole thing.”

Pearls of Wisdom

“If a piece of burning charcoal be placed on a man’s head, see how he struggles to throw it off. Similar will be the struggle for freedom of those who really understand that they are slaves of nature.”

Pearls of Wisdom

“Pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are ...but unless you realize the Truth, there is no freedom.”

Pearls of Wisdom

“I'm a lover of my own liberty, and so I would do nothing to restrict yours. I simply want to please my own conscience, which is God.”

1920s | Young India (21 January 1927)

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

1940s | Non-Violence in Peace and War , 1942, Vol. 1, Ch. 142

“There is no such thing as slow freedom. Freedom is like a birth. Till we are fully free we are slaves.”

1920s | Young India (15 December 1921)

“If one has no affection for a person or a system, one should feel free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite violence.”

1920s | Statement during his trial for "exciting disaffection toward His Majesty's Government as established by law in India" (18 March 1922) [ specific citation needed ]

“"To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse than starving the body.”

1930s

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

The Common Good

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”

Noam Chomsky in interview by John Pilger on The Late Show BBC Television, November 25, 1992 .

“[...] one must be cautious in assessing the political significance of the relative freedom from repression — at least for the privileged — in the United States. Exactly what does it mean, concretely?”

Language and Responsibility(1977)

“”Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression”, preface to Robert Faurisson Mémoire en défense (October 11, 1980)”

1980s

“[The "liberal media"] love to be denounced from the right, and the right loves to denounce them, because that makes them look like courageous defenders of freedom and independence while, in fact, they are imposing all of the presuppositions of the propaganda system.”

1995–1999 | Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996 [25]

“I am a citizen of the world.”

Diogenes Laërtius , vi. 63

“When some one boasted that at the Pythian games he had vanquished men, Diogenes replied, "Nay, I defeat men, you defeat slaves ."”

Quoted by Diogenes Laërtius | Diogenes Laërtius , vi. 33, 43

“To Xeniades , who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders."”

Quoted by Diogenes Laërtius | Diogenes Laërtius , vi. 36

“When the slave auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, "In ruling people ."”

Quoted by Diogenes Laërtius | Diogenes Laërtius , vi. 74

“Philo , Every Good Man is Free , F. H. Colson, trans. (1941), 157”

Quoted by Philo

“Tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former want only slaves, and the latter a play-thing.”

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Introduction

Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:

“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”

Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:

“Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”

Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:

“How can a being be generous who has nothing of its own? Or virtuous who is not free?”

Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:

“Genius will educate itself.”

“Life is whole only when it isn’t subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.”

On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxvii

“It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.”

On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxvii

“To choose evil is to choose freedom—“freedom, emancipation from all restraint.””

On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxxiv, note

Attributed to Georges Bataille:

“Sovereignty is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would impose.”

Attributed to Georges Bataille:

“The economy of expenditure is more fundamental than the economy of production.”

“Moses … denied to the members of the sacred commonwealth unrestricted liberty to use and partake of the other kinds of food. All the animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, thus titillating and exciting the malignant foe pleasure, he sternly forbade them to eat, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of the senses, the taste, and produce gluttony, an evil very dangerous both to soul and body.”

69.

“But you say, “by obedience to another he loses his liberty.” How then is it that children suffer the orders of their father and mother, and pupils the injunctions of their instructors?”

Every Good Man is Free | 36.

“We have a very clear evidence of freedom in the equality recognized by all the good in addressing each other.”

Every Good Man is Free | 48.

“Noble souls, whose brightness the greed of fortune cannot dim, have a kingly something, which urges them to contend on equal footing with persons of the most massive dignity and pits freedom of speech against arrogance.”

Every Good Man is Free | 126.

“He who has God alone for his leader, he alone is free.”

Every Good Man is Free | 20.

“In a free nation, it matters not whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason. Truth arises from the collision and from hence springs liberty, which is a security from the effects of reasoning.”

Quoted by Thomas Erskine in the trial of Thomas Paine , 1792

“No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice — when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves. See Chap. XIV of Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence . Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89. Quoted in Steve Sheppard, I Do Solemnly Swear: The Moral Obligations of Legal Officials (2009), preface - xxiv.”

Il n’y a point de plus cruelle tyrannie que celle que l’on exerce à l’ombre des lois et avec les couleurs de la justice, lorsqu’on va, pour ainsi dire, noyer des malheureux sur la planche même sur laquelle ils s’étaient sauvés.

“No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice — when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.”

Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline(1876) | See Chap. XIV of Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence . Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89. Quoted in

Attributed to Montesquieu:

“Liberty is the right to do what the laws permit.”

Attributed to Montesquieu:

“When power is constant, free states will not last.”

“We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty .”

Letter to Roger Tayeb, December 1961, as cited in Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), p. 185.

“The black man wants to be white . The white man slaves to reach a human level.”

Black Skin, White Masks(1952) | Introduction, page 9

Attributed to Frantz Fanon:

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”

Attributed to Frantz Fanon:

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

Attributed to Frantz Fanon:

“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.”

“Property is theft.”

Property is robbery! That is the war-cry of '93! That is the signal of revolutions ! Reader, calm yourself: I am no agent of discord, no firebrand of sedition . I anticipate history by a few days; I disclose a truth whose development we may try in vain to arrest; I write the preamble of our future constitution . This proposition which seems to you blasphemous — property is robbery — would, if our

“Anarchy is order; government is civil war.”

As man seeks justice in equality , so society seeks order in anarchy .

“Money, money, always money — that is the essence of democracy . Democracy is more expensive than monarchy; it is incompatible with liberty.”

Solution Du Problême Social , quoted by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 328

“I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none; I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government .”

As quoted in "The Authority Principle" in No Gods, No Masters : An Anthology of Anarchism (1980) Daniel Guérin, as translated by Paul Sharkey (1998), p. 90

“I build no system . I ask an end to privilege , the abolition of slavery , equality of rights , and the reign of law . Justice , nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.”

What is Property?(1840) | Ch. I: "Method Pursued in this Work. The Idea of a Revolution"

“Perhaps some day soon we will have arrived at the point when we can look back with irony at the barbaric old times when in order to be free we had to keep our own brothers and sisters slaves or to be equal we were constrained to inhuman sacrifices of freedom.”

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Attributed to Antonio Negri:

“Empire is the political form of post-Fordist capitalism.”

Attributed to Antonio Negri:

“Living labor is always already in excess of what capital can capture.”

Attributed to Antonio Negri:

“Constituent power must never be reabsorbed into constituted power.”

Attributed to Antonio Negri:

“The struggle is the source; capital is the parasite.”

“By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological presuppositions that shape the routine practices, conflicts, and transactions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not present itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will and imagination.”

p. 295

“In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as well as the economic and political occasion, to cross the frontier between the activities that take the framework for granted and those that bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the mind as imagination to become ascendant over the mind as machine. He has learned to philosophize by acting, in the sense that he recognizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation.”

p. 295

“The reader should understand that this book forms a small part of a larger intellectual program: a struggle against fate through thought, an effort to give new meaning and new life to projects of individual and social liberation that for the last two hundred years have shaken and aroused the whole world, a fight to imagine the forms that those projects can and should take if they are to have a future.”

p. 187

Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:

“We are bigger than the structures we build and inhabit; politics begins when we remember this.”

Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:

“Institutions are made by us, even when they seem most inevitable.”

“Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you.”

The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah

“Africa must unite.”

Africa Must Unite

“Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.”

Introduction," xi

“We face neither East nor West; we face forward.”

Capitalism is too complicated a system for a newly independent nation. Hence the need for a socialistic society.

“Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism just as feudalism is a development by refinement from slavery . … Capitalism is but the gentleman's method of slavery .”

Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation [2] , 1964

“God wants to exist and wants to be what he is, which means that he is free not only with regard to being in general, but above all with regard to his own being, in short, he is not bound either to his own existence or to his own essence.”

Wikiquote

“God himself, as absolute freedom and original will, contains, indeed is, the answer to the “fundamental question” [What is his name? (Ex. 3:13)], but he does not state it in explicit terms: he merely says “I am who I am, I am who I want to be”, which is a definitive statement. There is nothing more to say: it is an absolute act of will and freedom, by which God makes himself and declares himself master of his own being and of being in general.”

Wikiquote

“[Beauty] is always free and adherent: free because it does not adhere to conceptual knowledge, adherent because it adheres to an interpretation of nature.”

Wikiquote

Attributed to Luigi Pareyson:

“Each person is a unique interpretation of being.”

Attributed to Luigi Pareyson:

“Freedom is what makes the person more than nature.”

“Christ seeks souls, not property. ... He who wants a large part of mankind to be such that ... he may act like a ferocious executioner toward them, press them into slavery, and through them grow rich, is a despotic master, not a Christian; a son of Satan, not of God; a plunderer, not a shepherd.”

p. 40

“The Indians were totally deprived of their freedom and were put into the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitude and captivity which no one who has not seen it can understand. Even beasts enjoy more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the field.”

History of the Indies(1561)

Attributed to Bartolome de Las Casas:

“All the peoples of the world are human.”

Attributed to Bartolome de Las Casas:

“What right have we to subjugate those who have done us no wrong?”

Attributed to Bartolome de Las Casas:

“Christ did not come to enslave but to set free.”

“This liberalism says, in other words, that what makes the just society just is not the telos or purpose or end at which it aims, but precisely its refusal to choose in advance among competing purposes and ends. In its constitution and its laws, the just society seeks to provide a framework within which its citizens can pursue their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others”

Michael J. Sandel, "The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self" (1984)

“Unlike the liberty of the early republic, the modern version permits — in fact even requires — concentrated power.”

Michael J. Sandel, "The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self" (1984)

“To put the point another way, the republican sees liberty as internally connected to self-government and the civic virtues that sustain it.”

Democracy's Discontent(1996) | Chap. 2. Rights and the Neutral States

“The idea that freedom consists in our capacity to choose our ends finds prominent expression in our politics and law. Its province is not limited to those known as liberals rather than conservatives in American politics; it can be found across the political spectrum.”

Democracy's Discontent(1996) | Chap. 1. The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism

“Chap. 3. Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech”

Democracy's Discontent(1996)

“There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism . … The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil , that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.”

Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 147

“There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism . … The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil , that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence”

Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 147

Attributed to Nikolai Berdyaev:

“Freedom precedes being.”

Attributed to Nikolai Berdyaev:

“Personality is created by God and is itself creative.”

Attributed to Nikolai Berdyaev:

“Creativity is the response of human freedom to the divine call.”

“But you say, “by obedience to another he loses his liberty.” How then is it that children suffer the orders of their father and mother, and pupils the injunctions of their instructors?”

Every Good Man is Free | 36.

“We have a very clear evidence of freedom in the equality recognized by all the good in addressing each other.”

Every Good Man is Free | 48.

“Noble souls, whose brightness the greed of fortune cannot dim, have a kingly something, which urges them to contend on equal footing with persons of the most massive dignity and pits freedom of speech against arrogance.”

Every Good Man is Free | 126.

“He who has God alone for his leader, he alone is free.”

Every Good Man is Free | 20.

“The good man … has learnt to set at naught the injunctions laid upon him by those most lawless rulers of the soul, inspired as he is by his ardent yearning for the freedom whose peculiar heritage it is that it obeys no orders and works no will but its own.”

Every Good Man is Free | 22.

“Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.”

Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151

“The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified.”

Preface, p. ix

“There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, with their own individual lives.”

Ch. 3 : Moral Constraints and the State; Why Side Constraints?, p. 32

“Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.”

Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, Redistribution and Property Rights, p. 169

“Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably.”

Anarchy, State, and Utopia(1974) | Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 312