Top 100 Free Society Quotes
#1. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#2. A truly free society protects all faiths, and true faith protects a free society.
Rick Warren
#4. Freedom is won by relegating religion to a purely private sphere remote from the body politic. In fact, the establishment of a free society is predicated on the idea that religion must be surgically removed from culture.
William Anthony Donohue
#5. When it comes to dress, we are supposedly free to wear whatever we want - but if this is the case, why do we wear such similar clothes? Why are we choosing to wear shoes that are almost perfectly designed to make walking as difficult as possible?
Caroline Criado-Perez
#6. In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.
Daniel Dennett
#7. Often I didn't think I was cut out for the way the world is, being born into a common culture and system I would never choose for myself.
Jackie Haze
#8. Terrorism thrives on a free society. The terrorist uses the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist. If the terrorist succeeds, he has won and the whole of free society has lost.
Margaret Thatcher
#9. Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family
in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.
Camille Paglia
#10. You will free yourself from emotional drama by uncovering all the lies you believe in. It is a process of unlearning the lies. It is a period of cleansing, and it has nothing to do with the dream of society.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#11. Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics ... derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.
Benjamin Franklin
#12. Don't let society's defined genre hold you down, be a free spirit and just write, let society be the one to decide where each piece fits in.
Uma Nnenna
#13. I worry very much about kids growing up in a society where they think: "I'm not going to talk about this issue, read this book or explore this idea because someone may think I'm a terrorist." That's not the kind of free society I want for our children.
Bernie Sanders
#14. To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.
Aldous Huxley
#15. There is only one ' principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#17. I can think of few more worthy achievements than keeping a library alive and well for a century. As far as I am concerned, one of the absolute backbones of a free society and a democracy is the library offering access to a treasure house of information to all.
Gillian Roberts
#18. The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
(Adlai E. Stevenson, 1900-1965, American Lawyer, Politician)
Adlai E. Stevenson II
#19. How many men must die before we can really have a free and true and peaceful society? How long will it take?
Coretta Scott King
#20. If you try to discuss multiculturalism in the UK you're labelled a racist. But here we're still free to talk, and I say multicultural society doesn't work. We're not living closer, we're living apart.
Pim Fortuyn
#21. The core political values of our free society are so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness that only a few malcontents, lunatics generally, ever dare to threaten them.
John McCain
#22. I never expected to run into a room and suddenly I belonged. I figured people who live on the fringes of society, they're more free. They can choose to visit anywhere; they don't belong to anywhere. It's like being without a nation, in a way.
Mark Bradford
#23. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we're civilized people, we publicly criticize that, and don't belong to those groups or don't associate with those people.
Rand Paul
#24. I've come to realize that
one of the perks of a free society is the inalienable right to debase ourselves in a wide variety of ways...
Steve Purcell
#25. The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government ... An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#26. By focusing once and for all on helping the Palestinians build a free society, I have no doubt that an historic compromise between Israelis and Palestinians can be reached and that peace can prevail.
Natan Sharansky
#27. Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society.
Bill Moyers
#28. We can't hide it or fake it. We'll never fit society's idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We're free to live how we want. It's liberating, if you choose to see it that way.
Sarai Walker
#29. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society.
Ellen Key
#30. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.
Lawrence Lessig
#31. Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy.
Nizar Qabbani
#32. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
#33. Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.
John F. Kennedy
#34. A privately owned world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand.
Eugene V. Debs
#35. In a free society, how can you commit a crime against yourself?
Jesse Ventura
#36. The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared ... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.
Shirley Hufstedler
#37. So this is all part of a free society. People are entitled to hold whatever view they want, and the media can report things how they wish.
Alexander Downer
#38. I think that the essence of a free and civilized society is that everything in it should be subject to criticism, that all forms of authority, should be treated with a certain reservation.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#39. What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television?
Wendell Berry
#40. I've been regulated my whole life. We have progressive taxes. It's not a free-market free-for-all. I completely understand that society has a perfectly legitimate right to put in structures and regulations and rules that make it fairer, better, cleaner.
Jamie Dimon
#41. To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.
Alan Paton
#42. When we have become free, we need not go mad and throw up society and rush off to die in the forest or the cave; we shall remain where we were but we shall understand the whole thing. The same phenomena will remain but with a new meaning.
Swami Vivekananda
#43. In this kind of super-capitalistic society, everything is turned into money. And one of the great things about art is it isn't worth anything. It's absolutely free. It's going to get made no matter what.
Brice Marden
#44. Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.
Ayn Rand
#45. History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.
Buzz Aldrin
#46. As I understand the American Founders, the most brilliant and daring idea they had was that it's possible to create a free society that could stay free forever.
Os Guinness
#47. Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.
John Adams
#48. As intelligent and responsible filmmakers, working in a free society, we have a duty to ensure that our chosen medium is a force for good. Especially in this ever-more complex and difficult world.
David Puttnam
#49. If the supply of virtue is insufficient in a free society like America, it is almost nonexistent in Islamic societies because coerced virtues are not virtues at all.
Dinesh D'Souza
#50. If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage.
William J. Brennan
#51. I think the enemy is self-censorship. In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself.
Tim Robbins
#52. Free enterprise capitalism has been the most powerful creative system of social cooperation and human progress ever conceived, but its perception and its role in society have been distorted.
John Mackey
#53. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.
Ayn Rand
#54. Even in democratic society, we don't have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#55. It occurred to me that I had the duty to give society something in exchange for the free education I was getting.
Mario Bunge
#56. In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.
John Grogan
#57. In a free society, government reflects the soul of its people. If people want change at the top, they will have to live in different ways. Our major social problems are not the cause of our decadence. They are a reflection of it.
Cal Thomas
#58. Ever so subtly, without even alluding to the last obstacles preserved by earlier opinions that we now push out of our path, we effectively replace the goal of a discrimination-free society with the quite imcompatible goal of proportionate representation by race and by sex in the workplace.
Antonin Scalia
#59. In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one's rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.
Bernard B. Kerik
#60. A society is only as free as its most oppressed and afflicted members.
Silvia Tennenbaum
#62. We are all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss classified information every day - go to any Washington or New York dinner party where real journalists are present, and you will hear discussion of leaked or classified information. That is journalists' job in a free society.
Naomi Wolf
#63. The wonder of a free-market society is that we can all do our best to package our message in an entertaining fashion and present it - and then everybody votes with their footsteps.
Max Lucado
#64. Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.
Michael Shermer
#65. The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.
William Beveridge
#66. Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free
society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.
James Bryant Conant
#67. In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
Ayn Rand
#68. Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#69. We must seek to be intellectually inclusive, just as we seek to be culturally inclusive. Ideas come and go - that's what makes a free society so vital.
Marianne Williamson
#70. We live in a democracy. We have this extraordinary opportunity to use our mind and say what we think, speak as we think. Sometimes what we say is objectionable to other people. But that is part of a free society.
Hal Holbrook
#71. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#72. The library is central to our free society. It is a critical element in the free exchange of information at the heart of our democracy.
Vartan Gregorian
#73. A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
Saul Alinsky
#74. In short, Anarchism means a condition or society where all men and women are free, and where all enjoy equally the benefits of an ordered and sensible life.
Alexander Berkman
#75. Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.
Noam Chomsky
#76. In America, we debate everything except capitalism. If there's an institution in your society that's above criticism, you're giving it a free pass to indulge all of its weaknesses and darker tendencies.
Richard D. Wolff
#77. I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.
Thomas Szasz
#78. A child cannot be free if his/her mother is not free. A husband cannot be free if his wife is not free. The society is nothing if women are nothing.
Manal Al-Sharif
#79. It's clear that other problems such as [ ... ] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.
Richard Stallman
#80. Freedom lies outside the pattern of society; but to be free of that pattern you have to understand the whole content of it, which is to understand your own mind.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#81. We are all blinded by deceit of what society or family tells us is right. Some of us choose to break free.
Tami Egonu
#82. The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives.
Terence Kealey
#83. In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.
Noam Chomsky
#84. Society says that to free a man from his demons you have to lock him in a cage; I say to lock his demons in a cage you have to free the man from society.
Jakk Folley
#85. Capitalist production ... was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this.
Friedrich Engels
#86. No matter how silly I think it all is, society is still society and we are not free of the burdens of hate.
Suzanne Palmieri
#87. Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.
Murray Bookchin
#88. It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas ... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, ... is fundamental to our free society.
Thurgood Marshall
#89. I care for the poor. I am the one willing to work with the poor and have a safety net we can all depend on and make people understand that nothing in life is free. You have to get back to society.
Paul LePage
#90. The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.
William E. Simon
#91. Once I really got into securities fraud prosecutions, I came to realize how central they were to the maintenance of a free market and how, in many ways, they are far more important to the welfare of our society than many of the more sensational criminal cases that one hears about.
Jed S. Rakoff
#92. I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
Terence McKenna
#93. On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.
Kathy Acker
#94. I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope ... there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.
Thomas Merton
#95. The world order which we seek is the co-operation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#96. I have an intense dislike for artificial society. In France, one could lead a free life - to do what one wanted to do without interference or criticism from one's neighbors.
Robert W. Service
#97. (Ah, lovely adolescence - when the "talented" are officially shunted off from the herd, thus putting the total burden of society's creative dreams on the thin shoulders of a few select souls, while condemning everyone else to live a more commonplace, inspiration-free existence! What a system . . . )
Elizabeth Gilbert
#98. Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or instrument of government - but the reverse ... If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom ...
Benno C. Schmidt Jr.
#99. As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
Paul Auster
#100. It is stimulating to live in a society that is not standardized or mechanized, and is free from monotony.
R.K. Narayan
