Wilhelm von Humboldt Quotes

You might as well expect rivers to run backwards as any man born free to be contented penned up.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

You'll never know how sweet freedom can be unless you've lost it for eight and a half years.

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

I'm like a caged animal sometimes. Let me yearn to breathe free.

Being oppressed means the absence of choices

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery

A slave has not the freedom even to do the right thing.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America... that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers and poison the fair fruits of freedom.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

It's difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

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

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Man is everywhere still in chains.

When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.

Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.

It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.