A man is morally free when...he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity

George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

every individual is made in the image of God, insofar as he or she is a rational and free creature capable of knowing God and loving him.

A man is free when he sees clearly the fulfillment of his being and is thus capable of making the envisioned self a reality.

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

To be moral, an act must be free.

It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.

Morality is not man's prison but rather the divine element in him.

Moral liberty and intellectual objectivity constitute a priori man’s deiformity.

God has conferred upon men liberty of their own will, in order that by purity and sinlessness of life they may become like unto God.

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

To the extent that we are free we are like God, who has no need of an idea of a God over Godself or of an incentive other than the moral law itself. But to the extent that we are also natural beings, we desire our own happiness in everything else that we desire, and we need the practical postulate of God to bring that happiness together with morality.

Man is like a tree, with the mighty trunk of intellect, the spreading branches of imagination, and the roots of the lower instincts that bind him to the earth. The moral life, however, is the fruit he bears; in it his true nature is revealed. It is the prerogative of man that he need not blindly follow the law of his natural being, but is himself the author of a higher moral law, and creates it even in acting it out.

Freedom is the key to Godliness