Alfred Whitney Griswold Quotes

This is not supposed to be a fascist country, where you are forced to do things you don't want to do. This is a free country.

To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.

There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled.

You will not make a man wiser by taking freedom of action from him. A man can only learn when he is free to act.

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.

We have built our State on the freedom of personal adventure.

A free people, free to believe as we wish, free to speak our minds, free to raise our children as we see fit, will, make no mistake about it, endure.

In democracies the people seem to act as they please.

No man is good enough to govern another without the other man's consent. I say this is the leading principle, the sheet anchor of American republicanism. … the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.

Freedom of choice can harm no one.

The essence of freedom is that each of us shares in the shaping of his own destiny.

Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Why is freedom such a hard sell? That's the question. In this country, why has the idea of individual liberty and responsibility become such a hard sell? That's something I never thought would happen here.

Pakistan is a free country, so according to me, in a free country, it's every right of the citizen to live the way they wish.

Listen, ladies and gentlemen. America is still a country of choices and options. And I have a lot of them.

I believe the highest aspiration of man should be individual freedom and the development of the individual.

The last line of defense in support of freedom and the Constitution consists of the people themselves. If the people want to be free, if they want to lift themselves out from underneath a state apparatus that threatens their liberties, squanders their resources on needless wars, destroys the value of the dollar, and spews forth endless propaganda about how indispensable it is and how lost we would all be without it, there is no force that can stop them.

We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.

The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want.

No one can be free unless he is independent. Therefore, the first active manifestations of the child's individual liberty must be so guided that through this activity he may arrive at independence.

Void of freedom, what would virtue be?

Yours for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being.

There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions.

It is far better to be free to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else

Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom.