Summer months have their perks, but they can also be a slower time of the year for many nonprofit organizations. To help you re-energize you and your work, be it in a summer slump or just when you’re having a harder day, we’ve compiled a list of quotes sure to inspire.
In honor of July 4 and our nation’s independence, here are 14 quotes to help you stay focused on the freedom your organization seeks to create or protect.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad pretty little unsexy ways, every day.
There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.
Freedom cannot be bestowed—it must be achieved.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
Have a favorite quote above or know another we didn’t include? Be sure to let us know in the comments below. Plus, get a free copy of World Changing Work: The Modern Nonprofit Professional’s Experience in which we examine the perspectives of nonprofit professionals on their current challenges, observations, and hopes for the future within the modern nonprofit landscape.
