“The natural state of man is to want to be free. To have opportunities. To have choices.”
On Arab Spring, Rumsfeld, that he wasn't surprised by popular uprisings of Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/03/08/rumsfeld.interview/index.html March 9, 2011.
2010s
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Donald Rumsfeld 38
U.S. Secretary of Defense 1932Related quotes
Is God a Taoist? (1977) http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html

Acceptance speech as "best actress" at the 69th Annual Academy Awards (24 March 1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phno8FKSl48, for her performance in Fargo · Full text online at the Academy Awards Acceptance Speech Database http://aaspeechesdb.oscars.org/link/069-3/
Context: It is impossible to maintain one's composure in this situation. What am I doing here? — especially considering the extraordinary group of women with whom I was nominated. We five women were fortunate to have the choice, not just the opportunity but the choice, to play such rich, complex female characters. And I congratulate producers like Working Title and Polygram for allowing directors to make autonomous casting decisions based on qualifications and not just market value. And I encourage writers and directors to keep these really interesting female roles coming — and while you're at it you can throw in a few for the men as well.

Source: How to Help the Unemployed (1894), p. 179
Context: Why should charity be offered the unemployed? It is not alms they ask. They are insulted and embittered and degraded by being forced to accept as paupers what they would gladly earn as workers. What they ask is not charity, but the opportunity to use their own labor in satisfying their own wants. Why can they not have that? It is their natural right. He who made food and clothing and shelter necessary to man's life has also given to man, in the power of labor, the means of maintaining that life; and when, without fault of their own, men cannot exert that power, there is somewhere a wrong of the same kind as denial of the right of property and denial of the right of life — a wrong equivalent to robbery and murder on the grandest scale.
Charity can only palliate present suffering a little at the risk of fatal disease. For charity cannot right a wrong; only justice can do that. Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.

“We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”
An ironic statement which Singer made in many interviews over many years; here quoted in "Isaac Singer’s Promised City" http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_3_urbanities-isaac.html City Journal (Summer 1997)
Variants or variant translations:
We must believe in free will — we have no other choice.
You must believe in free will; there is no choice.
We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.
This makes more sense if you consider the statement "we must believe in free will; we have no [other logical] choice"

The Rights of the Colonists (1772)

Letter to Georg Brandes (17 February 1871), as translated in Henrik Ibsen : Björnstjerne Björnson. Critical Studies (1899) by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes
Variant translation: The quality of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands still in the midst of the struggle and says: "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has lost it. Now this very contentedness in the possession of a dead liberty is a characteristic of the so-called state; and it is worthless.
As translated in Ibsen : The Man, His Art & His Significance (1907) by Haldane Macfall, p. 238
Variant translation: Neither moral concepts nor art forms can expect to live forever. How much are we obliged to hold on to? Who can guarantee that 2 plus 2 don't add up to 5 on Jupiter?
Context: He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands still in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it. Now this very contentedness in the possession of a dead liberty is characteristic of the so-called State, and, as I have said, it is not a good characteristic. No doubt the franchise, self-taxation, etc., are benefits — but to whom? To the citizen, not to the individual. Now, reason does not imperatively demand that the individual should be a citizen. Far from it. The State is the curse of the individual. With what is Prussia's political strength bought? With the absorption of the individual in the political and geographical idea. The waiter is the best soldier. And on the other hand, take the Jewish people, the aristocracy of the human race — how is it they have kept their place apart, their poetical halo, amid surroundings of coarse cruelty? By having no State to burden them. Had they remained in Palestine, they would long ago have lost their individuality in the process of their State's construction, like all other nations. Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution. Undermine the whole conception of a State, declare free choice and spiritual kinship to be the only all-important conditions of any union, and you will have the commencement of a liberty that is worth something. Changes in forms of government are pettifogging affairs — a degree less or a degree more, mere foolishness. The State has its root in time, and will ripe and rot in time. Greater things than it will fall — religion, for example. Neither moral conceptions nor art-forms have an eternity before them. How much are we really in duty bound to pin our faith to? Who will guarantee me that on Jupiter two and two do not make five?