Top 100 Moral Freedom Quotes
#1. I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#2. She would certainly eat only black bread and drink only water rather than sell her soul, and she would not surrender her moral freedom in return for comfort; she wouldn't surrender it for all Schleswig-Holstein [ ... ]
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#3. What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?
Henry David Thoreau
#4. Moral freedom now reigns. Materialism and the breakdown of the family are epidemic. Abortions, sexual evils, drugs, and crime are rampant.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#5. Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions-as
in moral truth and accountability they are.
Peter Drucker
#6. You are to do the choosing here and now during this exciting and wonderful time on earth. Moral agency, the freedom to choose, is certainly one of God's greatest gifts next to life itself. We have the honorable right to choose; therefore, we need to choose the right. This is not always easy.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#7. Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#8. Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.
George Weigel
#9. The real danger of the gay movement is its necessary goal of the elimination of this moral system in order to achieve this [sexual freedom]
Scott Lively
#10. In such cases, 'we overcome our moral feeling if necessary', freedom, peace, conscience even, all, all are brought into the market.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#11. The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed we have tried law , compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.
Albert J. Nock
#12. When we surrender moral government to the courts, we have surrendered the very essence of freedom, we have surrendered its only real meaning
and we will not be free again until we get it back.
Alan Keyes
#13. The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom.
Karl Marx
#14. When we are unwilling to draw clear moral lines between free societies and fear societies, when we are unwilling to call the former good and the latter evil, we will not be able to advance the cause of peace because peace cannot be disconnected from freedom.
Natan Sharansky
#15. The real need of the day is ... moral and spiritual rearmament ... God's Living Spirit can transcend conflicting political systems, can reconcile order and freedom, can rekindle true patriotism, can unite all citizens in the service of the nation, and all nations in the service of mankind.
Stanley Baldwin
#16. The moral equation strongly tells everyone who understands freedom, who understands morality, that Israel is engaging in a just war in defense of its people and its freedom.
George Pataki
#17. To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom is the very height of ignorance and futility.
Sri Aurobindo
#18. The challenge for people today
and it is not and easy one
is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.
Nathaniel Branden
#19. The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.
Edward Abbey
#20. Freedom is a gift to use your will and perception to impose a moral structure on yourself. Without the freedom to choose our path, we are morally crippled.
Omar Saif Ghobash
#21. It is impossible to maintain freedom and order and justice without religious and moral sanctions.
Barry Goldwater
#22. Today we are putting our hopes in materialism, in technological progress, and in freedom from moral absolutes. They have all failed. They've failed because they've been powerless to change the human heart. What is the answer? There is hope, if we will turn to God.
Billy Graham
#23. Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.
Ayn Rand
#24. History has taught us that freedom cannot long survive unless it is based on moral foundations. You can get the economics right, but in addition liberty must be cultivated as a moral quality.
Margaret Thatcher
#25. False rhetoric and false boastfulness spell moral ruin and lead unfailingly to political extinction.
Vladimir Lenin
#26. Let us rise in the moral power of womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy, and insulted justice, and eternal truth, and mighty love and holy freedom.
Maria Weston Chapman
#27. The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility.
Pope John Paul II
#28. America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.
John W. Gardner
#29. One should not consider that the great principles of freedom end at your own frontiers, that as long as you have freedom, let the rest have pragmatism. No! Freedom is indivisible and one has to take a moral attitude towards it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#30. The Libertarian position on the freedom of speech is a strong support of freedom of speech, and we oppose government intervention in controlling what is or is not moral.
Michael Badnarik
#31. More than anything else, let me be clear - we need to be willing to fight for freedom, and free markets, and traditional moral values. That's what the American people want to see this movement and this party return to.
Mike Pence
#32. History is full of examples of people who clamp down after they began to enjoy too much freedom. Freedom can lead to instability, anarchy, and confusion. So there can be a moral counter-revolution.
Gary Ross
#34. Tensions exist in any free society. But the freedom we enjoy rests on a foundation of individual liberty and shared moral values.
Tipper Gore
#35. Moral spontaneity" corresponds entirely with "religious and orthodox philosophy", "constitutional monarchy", "the Christian state", "freedom with certain limits", or in a figure, to the hero fetters to a sick bed.
Max Stirner
#36. They are our brothers, these freedom fighters ... They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong.
Ronald Reagan
#37. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Frederic Bastiat
#38. There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#39. Bad men cannot make good citizens. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience are incompatible with freedom.
Patrick Henry
#40. Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions ... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue ...
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#41. Living under the tremendous illusion that personal freedoms and freedom of speech are devoid of moral assumptions and responsibilities, we have bankrupted ourselves, so that honor, truth, and morality have been sacrificed at the altar of autonomy and self-worship.
Ravi Zacharias
#42. Tabloids invoke freedom of speech, but they're not interested in that, they're just interested in who's shagging whom, who's got drunk. And if you take that pretend, faux moral standpoint, you end up with people in public life being completely boring. Like they've had their genitals removed.
Jarvis Cocker
#43. The case for trade is not just monetary, but moral. Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.
George W. Bush
#44. For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H.L. Mencken
#45. Moral maturity and freedom require more than mere adherence to the law; they require an understanding of the why and wherefore of its rules and regulations- the principles that make it worthy of their allegiance.
Karen Bohlin
#46. Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family, and the school.
Margaret Thatcher
#47. Unless the will is free, man has no freedom; and if he has no freedom he is not a moral agent, that is, he is incapable of moral action and also of moral character.
Charles Grandison Finney
#48. Martin took the same course, thinking as he went, that perhaps the free and independent citizens, who in their moral elevation, owned the colonel for their master, might render better homage to the goddess, Liberty, in nightly dreams upon the oven of a Russian Serf.
Charles Dickens
#49. Man is certainly free, but he is responsible for this freedom before God as before men. This responsibility is inevitably moral. In order of this morality, to be free is to protect the freedom of others and their dignities.
Tariq Ramadan
#50. 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
#51. America must be the moral leader. It is not enough to have power. Power must be used to protect freedom and give all people hope for the opportunity to see the fruit of their own labor.
Jesse Helms
#52. I've always stressed the value of autonomy for intellectual and moral development. Autonomy provides us with a sphere of discretion which we all require.
Brian D'Ambrosio
#53. Curious people who have become accustomed to think that one cannot sustain the moral of the army without giving it the freedom to shed blood from time to time.
Moshe Sharett
#54. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
Milan Kundera
#55. Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man's freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
Ayn Rand
#56. ...in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.
Immanuel Kant
#57. I want you to have this feeling too - it is my moral responsibility to help you achieve this inner freedom.
Dmitri Mendeleev
#58. To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.
Richard Perle
#59. Unfortunately, we cannot live our lives according to the moral and religious convictions or petrified dogmas of our forebears. We have an obligation to live by our own faith, forever renewing the traditions of the past and adapting them to the demands of own time and place.
Farquhar McHarg
#60. It has therewith come to be recognized that the history of moral valuations is at the same time the history of an error, the error of responsibility, which is based upon the error of the freedom of will.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#61. We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.
J. William Fulbright
#62. I will not become a Napoleon nor an Alexander, and labour for my own ambition; but I will labour for freedom and for the moral well-being of man.
Lajos Kossuth
#63. There may be a legal obligation to obey, but there will be no moral obligation to obey. When it comes to history, it will be the people who broke the law for freedom who will be remembered and honoured.
Tony Benn
#64. Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#65. He only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to extend it to others. He who cares to have slaves must chain himself to them. He who builds walls to create exclusion for others builds walls across his own freedom. He who distrusts freedom in others loses his moral right to it.
Rabindranath Tagore
#66. It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.
Auberon Herbert
#67. The world has lost a visionary leader, a courageous voice for justice, and a clear moral compass. By showing us that the path to freedom and human dignity lies in love, wisdom and compassion for one another, Nelson Mandela stands as an inspiration to us all.
Kofi Annan
#68. We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.
William Wordsworth
#69. What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance
in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.
H.L. Mencken
#70. God has so framed us as to make freedom of choice and action the very basis of all moral improvement, and all our faculties, mental and moral, resent and revolt against the idea of coercion.
William Matthews
#71. Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.
Fulton J. Sheen
#72. The most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility.
Bill Moyers
#73. To answer brutality with brutality is to admit one's moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Mahatma Gandhi
#74. The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike ... Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
C.S. Lewis
#75. The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.
Hans Hartung
#76. No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.
Jeffrey Tucker
#77. Every principle that wants to command strong allegiance must make a moral case. Men want to feel that what they are doing is useful, but they want also, and mainly, to feel that it is right. Freedom is one of these principles
Henry Wallich
#78. All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.
Mark Twain
#79. 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
#81. What Americans don't want to admit ... is that not only is there not a contradiction between state regulation and freedom, but in order for us to actually be free in our social interactions, there must be an extremely elaborated network of health, law, institutions, moral rules and so on.
Slavoj Zizek
#82. Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
W. H. Auden
#83. Freedom comes from moral self-control. There is no other way to achieve it.
Dennis Prager
#84. Volumes can be and have been written about
the issue of freedom versus dictatorship,
but, in essence, it comes down to a single question:
do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals
and to rule them by physical force?
Ayn Rand
#85. Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security.
Thomas Paine
#86. Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom, but it isn't alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere.
Flora Lewis
#87. Strengthen your mind and refuse to carry the burden of mental and moral weakness acquired in past years; burn them in the fires of your present divine resolutions and right activities. By this constructive attitude you will attain freedom.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#88. You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
William Blake
#89. Let your cry be for free souls rather than for freedom. Moral liberty is the only important liberty.
Joseph Joubert
#90. The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.
Daniel Hannan
#91. The goal of parenting is to create self-sufficient virtues in children. Applying external pressure and punishments tends to teach them fear-based compliance rather than the internalization of moral standards.
Stefan Molyneux
#92. But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
George Bernard Shaw
#93. You may take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you ...
Thomas Carlyle
#94. Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life ... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.
Margaret Thatcher
#95. Arbitrary rule has its basis, not in the strength of the state or the chief, but in the moral weakness of the individual, who submits almost without resistance to the domineering power.
Friedrich Ratzel
#96. Natural isn't the same as right. Normal isn't the same as moral. Everyone deserves a say in what happens to the world.
Audrey Greathouse
#97. Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
Assata Shakur
#98. You know, you don't retreat in the defense of freedom. You don't retreat in the defense of moral government and limited government. You don't retreat because people are going to defend bad things.
Russell Pearce
#99. It is past time for the U.S. government to fully fulfill our moral obligation to those who have fought for freedom and democracy.
Tim Ryan
#100. I am conservative with a small 'c.' It's possible to be conservative in fiscal policy, and tolerant on moral issues or questions of freedom of expression.
Mick Jagger
