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Here’s a score of pithy quotes about freedom to help celebrate the Fourth of July. Reuters

Americans celebrate the country’s birthday on the Fourth of July, gathering with family and friends year after year. As you mark Independence Day 2016 with them, here’s a compilation of inspiring quotations focused on freedom and its trappings:

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?”

2. Albert Einstein: “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”

3. Thomas Jefferson: “Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation and freedom in all just pursuits.”

4. Mahatma Gandhi: “Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?”

5. Abraham Lincoln: “Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

6. Thomas Paine: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

7. Franklin D. Roosevelt: “In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.”

8. Simone de Beauvoir: “I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

9. John Dickinson: “Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all! By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.”

10. Thomas Jefferson: “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!”

11. Benjamin Franklin: “Where liberty dwells, there is my country.”

12. John Hancock: “There, I guess King George will be able to read that.”

13. Martin Luther King Jr.: “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.”

14. Lyndon B. Johnson: “This, then, is the state of the union: free and restless, growing and full of hope. So it was in the beginning. So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.”

15. Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.”

16. Robert Frost: “You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.”

17. Harry Emerson Fosdick: “Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.”

18. Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, have always blown on free men.”

19. James G. Blaine: “The United States is the only country with a known birthday.”

20. William Faulkner: “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”

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