Quotes on Freedom

In between fireworks and barbeques this Fourth of July weekend, I encourage you to consider these deeper thoughts on what freedom is.  On the surface, freedom is an easy concept to think about.  We have the freedom to go to the grocery store or walk around the block, but these simple actions don’t fully capture the depth of the essence of freedom.  This Independence Day, I want to share some of the deepest, thought-provoking quotes on freedom and independence I could find.  

“How unreasonable people are!  They never use the freedoms they have but demand those they do not have; they have freedom of thought-they demand freedom of speech”  Soren Kierkegaard

“It is the whole soul, in fact, that gives rise to the free decision, and the act will be so much the freer the more the dynamic series with which it is connected tends to be the fundamental self...But the moments at which we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is why we are rarely free.” Henri Bergson

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” 

“The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitudes.”

Viktor Frankl

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Albert Camus

“The word freedom has no meaning; there are and there can be no free beings...One can no more conceive of a being behaving without a motive than of one arm of a scales moving up and down without the action of a weight.” Denis Diderot

“What is then liberty?  To be born is at once to be born in the world and to the world.  The world is already constituted, but never completely.  Under the first rapport, we are solicited, under the second, we are open to an infinity of possibilities.  But this analysis is still abstract, because we exist under these two relations at once.  There is therefore never determinism and never absolute choice; I am never a thing and never naked consciousness.” Maurice Merleau Ponty

“the generic features of the human race, when rightly understood, do not restrict man’s freedom, and should not artificially be made to do so.  A man develops qualities and activities of his own, and the basis for these we can seek only in the man himself.  What is generic in him serves only as a medium in which to express his own individual being.” Rudolf Steiner

“Free will is an illusion.  People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.” Scott Adams

“We must be the slave of laws if we want to be free.” Cicero

“While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no State.” Lenin

“Freedom is the right to do whatever the laws permit” Montesquieu