Free Society Quotes

#1. I came to the United States because I valued living as a free person, one who is able to advocate in a democratic society. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been turning into a less free society, a police and surveillance state, especially after 9/11.

Sami Al-Arian

#2. Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#3. Expect the rapidly expanding homeschool movement to play a significant role in the revolutionary reforms needed to rebuild a free society with constitutional protections.

Ron Paul

#4. It is only within a free society that the crucial moral features of human life can be protected and preserved

Tibor R. Machan

#5. We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong ... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.

Alexander Bickel

#6. To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government. We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both.

Robert Higgs

#7. The lesson has already been learned with alcohol prohibition. We tried to engineer an alcohol-free society and ended up with huge criminal enterprises, government corruption, children lured into organized crime and random violence that took the lives of countless innocent people.

Kurt Schmoke

#8. Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.

Richard Ebeling

#9. A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.

Clarence Thomas

#10. Integrity is the fundamental premise for military service in a free society. Without integrity, the moral pillars of our military strength, public trust, and self-respect are lost.

Charles A. Gabriel

#11. Life in a free society ... is heaven on earth to life in a socialist society such as Russia.

Margaret Thatcher

#12. In a free society, you get what you celebrate

Dean Kamen

#13. Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states "accountable" for their education performance ... In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats.

Ron Paul

#14. The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources ... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement ... They are the wellsprings of a free society.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#15. The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free - which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.

Alan Barth

#16. The one important distinction between the two factors of production is that in a free society, ownership of the human factor, labor, cannot be concentrated while ownership of the non-human factor, capital, can be.

Louis O. Kelso

#17. Japan is a well-educated, technological society. It is a free society, protects intellectual property.

John Roos

#18. Can someone within that society walk into the town square and say what they want without fear of being punished for his or her views? If so, then that society is a free society. If not, it is a fear society.

Natan Sharansky

#19. Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.

Natan Sharansky

#20. The path towards a free society has not been simple. There are tragic and glorious pages in our history.

Vladimir Putin

#21. A free society that allows each individual to seek his or her own selfish ends (without deliberately trying to harm anyone else) will produce a state in which everyone's interest is optimized without any individual knowing in advance what that state might be.

Stuart Kauffman

#22. Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

Thomas Sowell

#23. Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.

Felix Frankfurter

#24. Free society's organize around the "invisible hand" while Force society's organize around the State's "visible fist.

Orrin Woodward

#25. The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#26. To fulfill the promise of economic opportunity, we must remain true to the principle that collective bargaining is a cornerstone of a free society and indispensable to a strong middle class.

Thomas Perez

#27. I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society, and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it.

John Mackey

#28. Getting rid of the dictator is only a first step in establishing a free society. The dictatorship must also be disassembled.

George Ayittey

#29. A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.

Michael Polanyi

#30. Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn't do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.

Garry Kasparov

#31. To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate.

Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

#32. People getting rich in a free society in general - with some scammy exceptions, which are rare - makes everyone else richer, too.

Ben Stein

#33. Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole the church, party, nation and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society .

Eric Hoffer

#34. I don't think we're smart enough to design, in any detail what a perfectly just and free society would be like. I think we can give some guidelines and more significant, we can ask how we can progress in that direction.

Noam Chomsky

#35. In a fully free society, taxation-or, to be exact, payment for governmental services-would be voluntary.

Ayn Rand

#36. In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest.

J. William Fulbright

#37. I'm embarrassed for us as a free society that we actually want people punished for saying things we don't like.

Jim Norton

#38. Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society

Chelsea Manning

#39. The hallmark of a free society is that I may totally disapprove of what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it until I die.

Voltaire

#40. Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#41. A free society is one in which individuals are free to discover for themselves the available range of alternatives.

Israel Kirzner

#42. Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.

Virginia Postrel

#43. Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance - such abuses of the freedom of speech - a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#44. True prosperity can only come from a healthy economy and sound money. That can only be achieved in a free society.

Ron Paul

#45. If you had a free society you couldn't get people to go to war, if you had an intelligent type of upbringing in ones children. They would say; There must be many other ways of solving problems other then killing people.

Jacque Fresco

#46. A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.

Jacob M. Appel

#47. The Founders warned that a free society depends on a virtuous and moral people. The current crisis reflects that their concerns were justified.

Ron Paul

#48. We are ... living in a free society without the faith that built that society - and without the conviction and dedication needed to sustain it ... We still have the cathedral of freedom but how long will it last without the faith?

Thomas Sowell

#49. The free access to information is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. One of my favorite things to do as a young man was wander through the stacks of my hometown library. I'd just browse until I found something interesting. Libraries have definitely changed my life.

Ed Asner

#50. If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

Friedrich Hayek

#51. I believe only a free society can ever be truly secure. The goal should be to make terrorists feel threatened, not the American people.

Ron Paul

#52. In a free society, there comes a time when the truth - however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say - must be told.

Al Gore

#53. The lie was that we believed that we believed all people were created equal! What made us think we were this great free society? Those at the top believed it then, and we at the top believe it two hundred years later. That's the power of myth.

Richard Rohr

#54. In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.

Michael Shermer

#55. We all know growth is absolutely vital to a free society. No one should want Australia to be a stag-nation: a nation with a stagnant economy and stagnant aspirations.

Rupert Murdoch

#56. The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

Anthony Kennedy

#57. An armed society is a free society.

Howie Carr

#58. If you want a free society, teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all, encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves.

Jonathan Sacks

#59. I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.

Edward Abbey

#60. Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society, and which kinds of measures are particularly dangerous in this respect, can we hope that social experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.

Friedrich Hayek

#61. A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

Henry Steele Commager

#62. A free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.

Rand Paul

#63. Unfortunately, this is a free society, and we're gonna have people with trucks, and people with bombs.

Greta Van Susteren

#64. In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble.

Ron Paul

#65. A free press is the greatest guarantee of a free society. We must keep it alive. We have to tolerate obnoxious opinions. But I don't want only opinions. I want facts.

Anthony S. Pitch

#66. If you live in a free market and a free society, shouldn't you have the right to know what you're buying? It's shocking that we don't and it's shocking how much is kept from us

Robert Kenner

#67. I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card.

Ron Paul

#68. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
[Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]

John F. Kennedy

#69. There is no reason, in a free society, that farmers shouldn't be allowed to raise hemp. Hemp is a good product.

Ron Paul

#70. There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.

Herbert Marcuse

#71. In free society art is not a weapon ... Artists are not engineers of the soul.

John F. Kennedy

#72. If you never encounter anything in your community that offends you, then you are not living in a free society.

Kim Campbell

#73. I like the idea that there's no censorship, because it's consistent with my views that we live in a free society and people ought to be able to express their views.

Jerry Springer

#74. I accept that in a free society you have to justify reductions in people's liberties. I accept that, bearing in mind my starting point is that the most important human right is the right to life ...

John Howard

#75. A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value,

Charles Koch

#76. A free society is most threatened not by uses of government that are obviously bad, but by uses of government that seem obviously good.

Charles Murray

#77. For the next century, the Republicans have agreed that we will promote the dignity and future of every individual by building a free society under a limited, accountable government that protects liberty, security and prosperity for a brighter American dream.

Todd Tiahrt

#78. Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.

Felix Frankfurter

#79. Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Doris Lessing

#80. There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

P. J. O'Rourke

#81. The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

E.L. Doctorow

#82. During the interim, no matter how much agony the man may feel, he also experiences excitement, the excitement of learning how to cope with a closed society that reflects free society as a funhouse mirror reflects the human form: everything is there, but distorted.

Edward Bunker

#83. 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.

Dinesh D'Souza

#84. I have no doubt that given a real choice, the vast majority of Muslims and Arabs, like everyone else will choose a free society over a fear society.

Natan Sharansky

#85. In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good', but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil', especially since one man's good is another's evil

Milton Friedman

#86. We're a free society; we've got television. We have radio. We have newspapers. We have the videocassette, which is coming into play. These are new freedoms.

Ray Bradbury

#87. < ... > black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call "America." This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.

David Brion Davis

#88. Few policies are more calculated to destroy the existing basis of a free society than the debauching of its currency. And few tasks, if any, are more important to the champion of freedom than creation of a sound monetary system.

Hans F. Sennholz

#89. Perhaps Vanderbilt's most important role in the interest of our free society is to give the world educated men and women of character, possessing a fundamental integrity that affects both their thoughts and their actions.

Joe B Wyatt

#90. Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure and the infinite process of good housekeeping and the personal ingenuity-here constitute the life of a free society.

Winston Churchill

#91. The man in a free society must either blame himself (which leads to the melancholia of those plagued by inferiority complexes) or will be bound to accuse imaginary conspiraces of ill-wishers and downright enemies.

Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

#92. Loyalty in a free society depends upon the toleration of disloyalty.

Alan Barth

#93. The play of conflicting interests in a framework of shared purposes is the drama of a free society. It is a robust exercise, and often a noisy one. It is not for the faint-hearted, or the tidy-minded.

John W. Gardner

#94. In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.

Kathleen Norris

#95. Tensions exist in any free society. But the freedom we enjoy rests on a foundation of individual liberty and shared moral values.

Tipper Gore

#96. My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai E. Stevenson II

#97. I repeat to you-my own view is, is that if a State-if people decide to-what they do in the privacy of their house, consenting adults should be able to do. This is America. It's a free society, but it doesn't mean we have to redefine traditional marriage.

George W. Bush

#98. Without morality and virtue most things in a free society fall apart. But with them, anything is possible.

Glenn Beck

#99. 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

#100. It would be a sad thing if the religious and moral convictions upon which the American experiment was founded could now somehow be considered a danger to free society.

Pope John Paul II