Quotes About Freedom

De armoede van de mens is een slaaf; om te eten aanvaardt ze werk waarin ze geen vreugde heeft; alle werk dat niet vreugdevol is, is verwerpelijk, dacht ik, en ik betaalde de rust van velen. Ik zei: 'Werk maar niet; je vindt het vervelend.' Ik droomde voor ieder van hen van de vrijheid waarzonder niets nieuws kan ontbloeien, geen enkel kwaad, geen enkele kunst.

To know how to free oneself is nothing, the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom. (pp13 - The immoralist)

Partons! et ne nous arrêtons que n'importe où!...

Les âmes semblables à la sienne se croient perdues, dès qu'elles ne sentent plus auprès d'elles tuteurs, rampes et garde-fous. De plus elles tolèrent mal chez autrui une liberté qu'elles résignent, et souhaitent d'obtenir par contrainte tout ce qu'on est prêt à leur accorder par amour.

Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

Lester wanted to rise up out of this like a cloud, to drift over the valley and shore to the Pacific, to dissolve into its huge green expanse like rain.

Caution has always ruled your kind. You depend upon the sanctity of locks—thus, what is prisoned by one man may be freed by another.

He thought back but Bianca, her foot heavy on the accelerator, thought away . From Rose, their mother, their entire past, books and papers and stories and sorrows: let it sink into the ocean. She had her wallet and her sleeping bag and her running shoes and her van; and she drove as if this were the point from which the rest of her life might begin.

Fatevi condizionare il meno possibile da una società che finge di darci il massimo della libertà.

Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.

Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.

Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.

Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman.

sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy; the more women do these things, the more sexually free they are.

I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I am free.

there is a great deal at stake here, many writers fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for the writer? freedom of invention, freedom to tell the truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new structures.

I had an abhorrence for killing, but it was raped from me, raped from my brain; obliterated, like freedom.

I want writers to write books because they are committed to the content of those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I want writers to write books that can make a difference in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to write books that are worth being jailed for, worth fighting for, and should it come to that in this country, worth dying for.

One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an unfree world, and in the course of redefining family, church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. To attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.

You do not teach someone to count only up to eight. You do not say nine and ten and beyond do not exist. You give people everything or they are not able to count at all. There is a real revolution or none at all.

Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free, he'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species. An animal carries out its slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand, claims to aspire to the absolute.

One doesn't need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Ofcourse it's important to print or exhibit, but if that's not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all -- being able to work without asking anybody's permission.