Quotes about Freedom

We need to expand the idea of choice to be about all the choices we make in our lives: including which country we choose to live in so we can be whole and full women.

Freedom is a school of responsibility for human beings.

The free society does not guarantee virtue any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed: it has to be won through personal striving.

Republicans, meanwhile, to one degree or another, all opposed slavery. The party itself was founded to stop slavery.

The morality of capitalism, just like the morality of democracy, is rooted in consent.

By contrast, Blanche K. Bruce was the real deal. Born into slavery in Virginia, Bruce was freed by his master and studied at Oberlin College before becoming a successful farmer and landowner. He is the only former slave to have served in the U.S. Senate.

The Republican ethos underlying these landmark provisions was aptly framed by the great abolitionist Republican, Frederick Douglass. Douglass said, "It is evident that white and black must fall or flourish together. In light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion, and every right, privilege and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color."

In order to give man freedom and enable human choices to have consequences, God creates for man an independent, lawful universe. The freedom of man requires, it turns out, the self-limitation of God as well as the independence of the world.

Inequality of outcomes is not seen as a necessary evil that government should seek to remedy; rather, the government itself exists to guard citizens' right to accumulate unequal fortunes and property.

Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best.

As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the thing we need.