Quotes about freedom
A collection of quotes on the topic of freedom.
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„Russian students? you ask. Yes, we have white Russians but not the Soviets. They have a wonderful school of their own which has produced superb musicians such as Sviatoslav Richter, Oistrakh, and Rostropovich. Those Russians that we have here chose freedom, but their Slavic temperament manifests itself just the same, and they have a marked talent for music.“
— Alfred Cortot Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor 1877 - 1962
in "Visit with Alfred Cortot" by Alexander Kosloff, Music Educators Journal (Feb.-Mar., 1962)

„I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.“
— Bobby Sands Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army 1954 - 1981
Republican News http://larkspirit.com/hungerstrikes/bios/sands.html, (16 December 1978)
Other writings
Context: I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. I shall not settle until I achieve liberation of my country, until Ireland becomes a sovereign, independent socialist republic.
„Anxiety was a philosophical concept before it taken up by psychology and psychiatry. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) argued that anxiety is part of human nature. Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future. Anxiety is a product of having the freedom to make choices and act, and by doing so make a commitment to one’s identity, ways of being in the world, and standing in relation to other people. For Kierkegaard, anxiety can be an avenue to stand in relation to God. This is why he wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
One can bracket out the God dimensions and still learn something valuable from Kierkegaard, namely that anxiety can cause inaction, which is, in its most basic sense, a loss of freedom. What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future. One becomes immobilized and unable to meet needs and realize goals and aspirations.“
— Peg O'Connor American philosopher 1965
"Anxiety Is a Part of Human Nature" https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/philosophy-stirred-not-shaken/201703/anxiety-is-part-human-nature, Psychology Today, (Mar 24, 2017).

„Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.“
— Hannah Arendt Jewish-American political theorist 1906 - 1975

„We think we have got freedom of the press. When one millionaire has ten newspapers and ten million people have no newspapers—that is not freedom of the press.“
— Anastas Mikoyan Russian revolutionary and Soviet statesman 1895 - 1978

„Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.“
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher 1949
"Reflections on State and War" (2 December 2006) http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe17.html

„How deeply the perverse Jewish spirit has penetrated German cultural life is shown in the frightening and horrifying forms of the Exhibition Of Degenerate Art in München ….. This has nothing at all to do with the suppression of artistic freedom and modem progress. On the contrary, the botched art works which were exhibited there and their creators are of yesterday and before yesterday. They are the senile representatives, no longer to be taken seriously, of a period that we have intellectually and politically overcome and whose monstrous, degenerate creations still haunt the field of the plastic arts in our time.“
— Joseph Goebbels Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister 1897 - 1945
Von der Großmacht zur Weltmacht on the seizure of thousands of works of German art. (26 November 1937)
1930s

„The people's community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy. Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions.“
— Joseph Goebbels Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister 1897 - 1945
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm “Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We Socialists?”
Written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher (1932). “Those Damned Nazis,” (Nazi propaganda pamphlet).
1930s

„The schooling system we have in the Western world is crazy – you’re taken away from your parents at your most impressionable age and fed a load of bullshit and lies manipulated to make you think that the way we live in the West is stable and moral, when really it’s neither. You come out of school with a one-track mind based on financial success; you’re encouraged to become enslaved to the banking system. In school, I always felt, ‘Something’s not right here’ and I’m starting to find out what it is. Being outside of the norm gives you freedom of thought and that’s something being suppressed in school and the media. If you have freedom of thought you get labeled as a crazy person or someone strange.“
— Мэттью Беллами English singer-songwriter 1978

„If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.“
— B.F. Skinner American behaviorist 1904 - 1990


„No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.“
— Paulo Coelho, book Eleven Minutes
Variant: i am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone.
that is the true experience of freedom:having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
Source: Eleven Minutes

„Money buys you the freedom to live your life the way you want.“
— Keanu Reeves Canadian actor, director, producer and musician 1964

„My Lords, I and the vast majority of the Jewish community, care deeply about the future of the Palestinians. We want Palestinian children, no less than Israeli children, to have a future of peace, prosperity, freedom and hope. Which is why we oppose those who teach Palestinian children to hate those with whom they will one day have to live; who take money given for humanitarian aid and use it to buy weapons and dig tunnels to take the region back to a dark age of barbarism.“
— Jonathan Sacks British rabbi 1948
Other

„I feel a kinship with you, too, you who have lost both brother and father. I know you have been judged and spoken of as the daughter of Valentine Morgenstern, and now the sister of Jonathan. There will always be those who want to tell you who you are based on your name or the blood in your veins. Do not let people decide who you are. Decide for yourself. That freedom is not a gift; it is a birthright. I hope that you and Jace will use it.“
— Cassandra Clare, The Mortal Instruments
Tessa Gray, to Clary Fray, pg. 716
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

„This first stage of the life of the whole race is savagery, raw nature:… a condition in which man enjoys the most exquisite goods, equality and freedom, in full abundance, and would also enjoy them forever, if he would follow the hint of nature and understand the art of not abusing his powers and preventing the outbreak of his excessive passions.“
— Adam Weishaupt German philosopher and founder of the Order of Illuminati 1748 - 1830
Die neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminaten-Orden (1794) pp. 20-21.