Let it be known I by no means agree with all the people quoted here, or endorse other things they may have said or done, but I compiled this list of Freedom Quotes from the Internet, of things that somebody said at one point or another which I found inspiring, I hope you also feel inspired by it, and will share it with your friends.

"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."
GK Chesterton

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
Martin Luther King Jr.

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."
Dwight Eisenhower

"Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years."
Nicolo Machiavelli

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!"

Patrick Henry

"It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, independence now and independence forever."
Daniel Webster

"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees."
Author Unknown

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be."
James Baldwin

"Arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time."
Winston Churchill

"A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man."
Tacitus

"If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower."
Adolf Hitler

"Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
Alexis de Tocqueville

"I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it."
Alexis de Tocqueville

"Freedom is not America's gift to the world, it is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world."
George W. Bush

"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature."
Benjamin Franklin

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
Henry Mencken

"Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions."
Ronald Reagan

"Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment."
Ronald Reagan

"It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you."
Dick Cheney

"The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree."
Thomas Campbell

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself."
Thomas Paine

"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
Abraham Lincoln

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Albert Camus

"Freedom is the last, best hope of earth."
Epictetus

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Freedom is never free."
Author Unknown

"The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage."
Thucydide

"You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's freedom. You can be free only if I am free."
Clarence S. Darrow

"The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object."
Thomas Jefferson

"Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed."
Charles Caleb Colton

"It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere."
Voltaire

"The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission."
John F. Kennedy

"It is my right to be uncommon. For I do not choose to be a common man, If I can, I seek opportunity. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the government look after me. I choose to take the calculated risk, to dream, to build, to fail or succeed. I choose not to barter incentive for a dole, I prefer the challenges of life to a guaranteed existence, the thrill of fulfillment to the state calm of Utopia. I will not trade my freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout."
Unknown Source

"The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free."
Henry David Thoreau

"It is quite impossible to guarantee world peace. But it should be possible to guarantee world freedom."
Unknown Source

"The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force."
Voltaire

"The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves."
George Washington

"Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth."
George Washington

"Free people, remember this maxim: We may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost."
Jean Jacques Rousseau

"He who is brave is free."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Freedom is the only law which genius knows."
James Russell Lowell

"Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too."
W. Somerset Maugham

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."
Ezra Pound

"We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity, the Declaration of Independence."
Abraham Lincoln

"No man is free who is not a master of himself."
Epictetus

"When ever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is safe."
Edmund Burke

"Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man."
Miguel de Cervantes

"Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered."
Marcus Tulius Cicero

"Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery."
Wayne Dyer

"Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind."
Charles Caleb Colton

"In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it."
John F. Kennedy

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Benjamin Franklin

"The Supreme Court is steadily eroding the protections against police excess promised by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution."
Dan Baum

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
Charles A. Beard

"The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur."
James Bovard

"If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom."
Tom Braun

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke

"The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse."
Edmund Burke

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."
William S. Burroughs

"Today the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury."
William J. Campbell

"Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own."
John Jay Chapman

"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
Sir Winston Churchill

"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others."
Sir Winston Churchill

"If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law."
Sir Winston Churchill

"I like a man who grins when he fights."
Sir Winston Churchill

"Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.'"
Sir Winston Churchill

"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."
Ramsey Clark

"The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power."
Thomas Cooper

"The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ... This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."
Elmer Davis

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
Bertrand de Jouvenel

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, ... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."
Declaration of Independence

"But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
Declaration of Independence

"Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source -- from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives."
John Dickinson

"It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest."
Justice William O. Douglas

"The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life."
Justice William O. Douglas

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."
Justice William O. Douglas

"The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty."
Justice William O. Douglas

"The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. It is one of the great landmarks in men’s struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized."
Justice William O. Douglas

"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history."
Justice William O. Douglas

"Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged."
Justice William O. Douglas

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down."
Frederick Douglass

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
Albert Einstein

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
Albert Einstein

"Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid."
Epictetus

"An anarchist is an uncomprimising liberal."
Émile Faguet

"We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."
William Faulkner

"We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent."
Abraham Flexner

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Henry Ford

"We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship."
E. M. Forster

"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."
Harry Emerson Fosdick

"“For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction. "
Janet Frame

"Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes."
Benjamin Franklin

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin

"Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you."
Benjamin Franklin

"No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session."
Benjamin Franklin

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."
Sigmund Freud

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
Milton Friedman

"If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it."
Erich Fromm

"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."
Edward Gibbon

"Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind."
Edward Gibbon

"You can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?"
Kahlil Gibran

"Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed."
Josiah William Gitt

"Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion."
William Godwin

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Tolerance comes of age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
Barry Goldwater

"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny."
Barry Goldwater

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Barry Goldwater

"The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak."
Wavy Gravy

"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."
Germaine Greer

"To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism."
G. Edward Griffin

"I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it."
Judge Learned Hand

"They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?"
Paul Harvey

"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it."
John Hay

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
Fredrich August von Hayek

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."
William Hazlitt

"The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who have no such desire."
Robert A. Heinlein

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."
Patrick Henry

"It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Patrick Henry

"The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop."
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen

"Political correctness is simply tyranny with manners."
Charlton Heston

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams