Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s:
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Often attributed to Lila Watson, who has said she was "not comfortable being credited for something that had been born of a collective process" - the attribution here is the one she accepts.
Abraham Lincoln (attributed):
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among human creatures.
Albert Einstein:
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
Aldous Huxley:
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Barbara Ehrenreich:
That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing -- the truly democratic thing about it -- is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.
Benjamin Franklin:
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
C. Wright Mills:
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.
Carl Shurz:
If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
Charlie Daniels:
A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You're free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Clarence Darrow:
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
Dorothy Thompson:
When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
Dorothy Thompson:
Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.
Dorothy Thompson:
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
Edward R. Murrow:
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.
Epictetus:
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
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