Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

I should like to be remembered as the man who raised a voice against... placing limitations on the freedom of the individual.

The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other

It is essential that the young people of this country learn to respect the right of every man and woman to seek his or her happiness with minimal interference from the government.

Nobody likes not having freedom.

In England, your life is your life.

I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

Personal liberty is not personal license.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

No man can given anybody his freedom.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Ordinary Chinese can actually make choices about their own lives which wasn’t possible 25 years ago.

America is the most individualist, libertarian culture in the world.

Liberty is the absence of constraints and impediments.

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

Freedom is the English subject's prerogative.

Freedom looks differently when you are the one it is being practiced on.

This is the first step on the odious ground of conscription—a plan sir, which never will and never ought to be submitted to by this country while it retains one idea of civil freedom.

There can be no freedom if there is a denial of the freedom to err.

Liberty consists in doing what one desires.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

The human mind is ever oscillating between the extremes of authority and individualism; and if the former – the Catholic idea – finds lodgment in the minds of this people, we ring the death-knell of American liberties.

My freedom is more important than your good idea.