This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Freedom of conscience, of education, of speech, of assembly are among the very fundamentals of democracy and all of them would be nullified should freedom of the press ever be successfully challenged.
Conscience | Democracy | Education | Freedom of conscience | Freedom | Speech |
Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions - bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
Agitation | Freedom | Nothing | People | Power | Struggle | Will |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
In the truest sense freedom cannot be bestowed, it must be achieved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in their own way everywhere in the world. The third freedom is from want everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear everywhere in the world.
Fear | Freedom from fear | Freedom of speech | Freedom | God | Speech | World | Worship | God |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Life as a sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. Many diverse details have a bearing on the preservation of life, and when we have our eyes on the future we have to engage ourselves in these details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now, the future is not absolute but ever exposed to accident. Hence it is only the necessity of the immediate present which can justify a wrong action, because not to do the action would in turn be to cause not to do the action would in turn be to commit an offense, indeed the most wrong of all offenses, namely the complete destruction of the embodiment of freedom.
Absolute | Abstract | Accident | Action | Cause | Ends | Example | Freedom | Future | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Offense | Present | Property | Right | Rights | Self | Self-preservation | Wrong |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To adhere to man’s absolute freedom - one aspect of the matter - is eo ipso to condemn slavery. Yet if a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery, just as it is its will which is responsible if a people is subjugated. Hence the wrong of slavery lies at the door not simply of enslavers or conquerors but of the slaves and the conquered themselves. Slavery occurs in man’s transition from the state of nature to genuinely ethical conditions; it occurs in a world where a wrong is still right. At that stage wrong has validity and so is necessarily in place.
Absolute | Freedom | Man | Nature | People | Right | Slavery | Will | World | Wrong |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first freedom is speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world-terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world-terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
Aggression | Fear | Freedom from fear | Freedom | Future | God | Life | Life | Means | Position | Speech | Time | Vision | Will | World | Worship | God |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Will without freedom is an empty word, while freedom is actual only as will, as subject... Mind is in principle thinking, and man is distinguished from beast in virtue of thinking. But it must not be imagined that man is half thought and half will, and that he keeps thought in one pocket and will in another, for this would be a foolish idea. The distinction between thought and will is only that between the theoretical attitude and the practical. These, however, are surely not two faculties; the will is rather a special way of thinking, thinking translating itself into existence, thinking as the urge to give itself existence.
Distinction | Existence | Freedom | Man | Mind | Thinking | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Theoretical | Thought |
Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure for freedom than unconventionality does.
Freedom | Leisure | People | Reason | Society | Thought | Time | Society | Trouble | Thought |
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without ploughing the ground.
Controversy | Freedom | People | Progress | Struggle |
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity
Henrik Ibsen, aka Henrik Johan Ibsen
It gives one a sense of freedom to know that anyone in this world can really do a deliberately courageous act.
Every man is free to do what he will, provided he infringes not upon the equal freedom of any other man.
Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war.
Democracy | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justice | Law | Majority | Mockery | Office | Public | Regard | Rule | Speech | Trials | War | World |
The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them.
Discussion | Error | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justification | Purpose | Purpose | Speech | Truth |
True spirituality is not a removal or escape from life. It is an opening, a seeing of the world with a deeper vision that is less self-centered, a vision that sees through dualistic views to the underlying interconnectedness of all life. Liberation is the discovery of freedom in the very midst of our bodies and minds.
Discovery | Freedom | Life | Life | Self | Spirituality | Vision | World | Discovery |