Quotes about Freedom

The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life.

There still remains only God to protect man against man. Either we will serve him in spirit and in truth or we shall enslave ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous idol that we have made with our own hands to our own image and likeness. Etienne Gilson, 20th century

For while we may debate our freedom to choose, there is no doubt that we are not free not to choose.

The Spirit of Liberty" is not to be found in courts, laws and constitutions alone. "Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to save it. While it lives there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it."" The

Jean Jacques Rousseau was at least right about this: better to face up to one's chains than to deck them with flowers and pretend they are not chains." ? Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. ST. AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

To most people at the time it was unthinkable that religion might ever not be what it was then. However, Bryce mused, if religion in America were ever to lose its strength and authority, the result would be "the completest revolution of all." The strongest bonding in American society would have gone, and unbounded freedom would run amok and work to cause its own undoing.

For anyone who understands freedom, it is simply inescapable that freedom requires truth, a shared sense of truth, and therefore trustworthiness and trust.

Without truth there is no freedom, and without truth there is no freedom from hypocrisy. No one has ever seriously accused Jesus of hypocrisy, no one has ever been more severe on hypocrisy than Jesus, and no one has ever offered a sterner but more gracious and effective cure to hypocrisy than Jesus.

For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

but conformity to the will and the way of Jesus is life and freedom itself—under his authority.

In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.