Human Freedom Quotes - Page 4

• Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation

  Julia Kristeva

  Fashion, War, Cities

  35 Copy quote

• It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

  Horace Greeley

  Bible, Reading, Biblical

  107 Copy quote

• The history of humanity is the history of human freedom...Freedom is not, as Engels thought, "the recognition of necessity." Freedom is the opposite of necessity. Freedom is necessity overcome. Progress is, in essence, the progress of human freedom. Yes, and after all, life itself is freedom. The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom.

  Vasily Grossman

  Essence, Opposites, Humanity

  9 Copy quote

• I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.

  Edward Said

  Believe, Thinking, Issues

  117 Copy quote

• Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

  Rollo May

  Self, Wish, Weight

  6 Copy quote

• A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

  Karen Armstrong

  Atheist, Creativity, Self

  22 Copy quote

• I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense... Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due.

  Albert Einstein

  Real, Believe, Philosophical

  9 Copy quote

• Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Believe, Moving, Men

  43 Copy quote

• Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.

  Daniel Dennett

  Opportunity, Enemy, Environmental

  Daniel C. Dennett (2004). “Freedom Evolves”, p.221, Penguin UK

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Government, Church, Needs

  Charles Horton Cooley (1922). “Human Nature and the Social Order”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see? No. But yeah. The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

  Louise Erdrich

  Father, Order, Opposites

  5 Copy quote

• Without a strong educational system — free of government control — democracy is crippled. Knowledge is not only the key to power. It is the citadel of human freedom.

  Harry S. Truman

  Strong, Educational, Keys

  "Harry S. Truman: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1945-53".

  110 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant. And that is the force of human freedom.

  George W. Bush

  Tyrants, Hatred, Reign

  Second Presidential Inaugural Address, delivered 20 January 2005

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power.

  Emma Thompson

  Thinking, Ideas, Form

  "Does slang make you sound stupid?". Robert McCrum and Doc Brown Debate, www.theguardian.com. October 2, 2010.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the . . . West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.

  Ronald Reagan

  Running, Freedom, Home

  Address to British Parliament, delivered 8 June 1982, Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster, London

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit. People, worldwide, hunger for the right of self-determination, for those inalienable rights that make for human dignity and progress. America must remain freedom's staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally and it is the world's only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace. Every blow we inflict against poverty will be a blow against its dark allies of oppression and war. Every victory for human freedom will be a victory for world peace.

  Ronald Reagan

  Determination, War, Dark

  Second Inaugural Address, delivered 21 January 1985, Rotunda of the Capitol, Washington D.C.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The majority of humankind does not accept this system, despite claims of worldwide support. Even with Russia's ratification, 75% of the world's CO2 is emitted by, 68% of the world's GDP is produced in, and 89% of the world's population live in countries that are not handcuffed by Kyoto's restrictions. Like fascism and communism, Kyotoism is an attack on basic human freedoms behind a smokescreen of propaganda. Like those ideologies of human hatred, it will be exposed and defeated.

  Andrey Illarionov

  Country, Kyoto, Gdp

  5 Copy quote

• The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness.

  Immanuel Kant

  Destiny, Men, Race

  Immanuel Kant (1963). “Lectures on ethics”

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view and act on death as a dignified moral and godly choice for those suffering with terminal illnesses.

  John Shelby Spong

  Godly, Views, Decision

  4 Copy quote

• The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works of human freedom.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Spiritual, Moving, Humanity

  49 Copy quote

• We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world, by thus fostering Human Slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of Human Freedom.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Hypocrite, Political, World

  Speech, Springfield, Ill., 4 Oct. 1854

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority. It is the one guaranty of human freedom to the American people.

  Frank I. Cobb

  Freedom, Rights, People

  La Follette's Weekly Magazine, 1920.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human rights, human freedoms... and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world... while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.

  Vaclav Havel

  Powerful, Patriotic, Rights

  "Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism" by Slavoj Zizek in London Review of Books, Volume 21, No. 21 (pp. 3-6), www.lrb.co.uk. October 28, 1999.

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured.

  Suzanne La Follette

  Wine, Men, Rights

  5 Copy quote

• Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Recovery, Justice

  4 Copy quote