Milan Kundera Quotes

No man may make another free.

You either respect people's liberties, or you don't.

Liberty isn't a thing you are given as a present. You can be a free man under a dictatorship. It is sufficient if you struggle against it.

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.

Where are the heroes and the saints, who keep a clear vision of man's greatest gift, his freedom, to oppose not only the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family, and of the indigent, and claims our young for war?

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.

There goes your freedom of choice, there goes the last human voice.

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.

I find freedom to be the most important issue facing any human being today, because without freedom, then life is pointless. The more dependent you become on centralized power, the more easily you are lead around.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

All I'm for is the liberty of the individual.

Who loseth his freedom, he loseth all.

The sacred right of self government … has been so perverted so that if one man decides to enslave a second man, a third man may not object.

As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life’s passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their corporate seats.

Freedom is not the natural state of mankind. It is a rare and wondrous thing.

Civilized men do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains....

Security is no replacement for liberty.

When you have no freedom, then your life becomes the life of an animal.

There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men.

Slavery is perhaps the greatest affront to the fundamental principle of individual liberty.

There is no freedom in peaceful slavery.

We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.

Once people who have been deprived of basic freedom taste a little of it, they want all of it.

Ultimately freedom is necessary for a society, because every despotic society - for instance, the Russian society - lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma - the Marxist dogma of world redemption through Communism.