Facts, like people, want to be free — and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner.

The line links the political ideal of human freedom to the epistemic ideal of open information. By personifying “facts” as beings that “want to be free,” it suggests that truth has a natural tendency to surface when not constrained by censorship, secrecy, or propaganda. The second clause—“when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner”—argues that transparent access to reality is a precondition for democratic self-government: citizens can only choose, dissent, and hold power accountable when they can see what is happening. The phrasing also echoes the rhetoric of digital-rights culture, where “information wants to be free,” reframing it in moral and civic terms rather than purely technological ones.