2015, Remarks at Panama Civil Society Forum (April 2015)
“These citizens remind us why civil society is so essential. When people are free to speak their minds and hold their leaders accountable, governments are more responsive and more effective. When entrepreneurs are free to create and develop new ideas, then economies are more innovative, and attract more trade and investment, and ultimately become more prosperous. When communities, including minorities, are free to live and pray and love as they choose; when nations uphold the rights of all their people -— including, perhaps especially, women and girls -— then those countries are more likely to thrive. If you want strong, successful countries, you need strong, vibrant civil societies. When citizens are free to organize and work together across borders to make our communities healthier, our environment cleaner, and our world safer, that's when real change comes.”
2014, Remarks at Clinton Global Initiative (September 2014)
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Barack Obama 1158
44th President of the United States of America 1961Related quotes
2015, Remarks at Panama Civil Society Forum (April 2015)
Remarks by President Obama and President Kenyatta of Kenya in a Press Conference at Kenyan State House in Nairobi, Kenya (July 25, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/25/remarks-president-obama-and-president-kenyatta-kenya-press-conference
2015
This quotation appeared in an article by Margaret Thatcher, "The Moral Foundations of Society" ( Imprimis, March 1995 https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-moral-foundations-of-society/), which was an edited version of a lecture Thatcher had given at Hillsdale College in November 1994. Here is the actual passage from Thatcher's article:
<blockquote>[M]ore than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.</blockquote>
The italicized passage above originated with Thatcher. In characterizing the Athenians in the article she cited Sir Edward Gibbon, but she seems to have been paraphrasing statements in "Athens' Failure," a chapter of classicist Edith Hamilton's book The Echo of Greece (1957), pp. 47–48 http://www.ergo-sum.net/books/Hamilton_EchoOfGreece_pp.47-48.jpg).
Misattributed
I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)
Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 1 : We, the People, the New American Slaves, p. 8
Address at the Hotel Fairmont in San Francisco (6 October 1909).
“Government cannot make trade more fair by making it less free.”
From The Fair Trade Fraud (St. Martin's Press, 1991) http://www.jimbovard.com/Epigrams%20page%20Fair%20Trade%20Fraud.htm
Source: Speech at the first anniversary of the founding of Seoul Board of Education (2 October 1957)