Quotes About Freedom

I'm totally disinterested in politics.... Yes. I live outside of the political world. Because I have no control. Because all my interest is in cinema, and not even all of cinema.

This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.

What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in... It's such an amazing kind of petty tyranny.

an understanding that choices, once made, are absulote, that the realm of freedom exists only in the present and in the future, and that more harm than good is done in reimagining that some choice in the past might have been dismissed in favour of a better option. This kind of thinking will lead only to regret, to the rotting of a man from inside out.

If you are very lucky, you're allowed to be in certain places during just the right season of your life: by the sea for the summer when you're seven or eight and full of the absolute need to swim until dark and exhaustion close their hands together, cupping you in between.

The only moments I have when I play that are worth anything to me are when I can blissfully ignore the people I am supposed to be entertaining. No me; no silly public to amuse; only the heart and the soul, the world, the birds, storms, dreams, sadness, heavenly serenity. Then I am an artist worthy of the name . . . . Until it happens, or if it doesn't happen, I am miserable.

Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.

In many different ways, the attack on values of collectivity and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependence on others, while in fact we are experiencing a more comprehensive subjection to the "free" workings of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is "to be free of other selves.

Wells argued that, in fact, jury trials in fugitive cases were unconstitutional because they placed a barrier between a slaveholder and his slave property.

See how (for instance) the cultural can be freed from the tyranny of the natural; gender from biology; how social change has occurred, and how it can change again; how to reveal and defend (without fetishizing) cultural difference; how to make visible the 'political unconscious' of our culture.

there is no way that the Will can determine an act of the Will, than by willing that act of the Will, or, which is the same thing, choosing it.

in order to act freely, we must act by chance, which is absurd, and what no man will dare to avow.

Arminian notion of Liberty of the Will, consisting in the will's Self-determination, is repugnant to itself, and shuts itself wholly out of the world.

go on to the end—hoping, praying, serving, loving—realizing that only the strong are free.

Scottish philosopher William Drummond, read: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot reason is a fool; he who dares not reason is a slave.

You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

For example, do you agree that "the government should do more to advance the common good, even if that means limiting the freedom and choices of individuals"? If so, then you are probably a liberal. If not, then you could be either a libertarian or a conservative. The split between liberals (progressives) and libertarians (classical liberals) occurred over exactly this question more than a hundred years ago, and it shows up clearly in our data today.

Some constraint is good for us; absolute freedom is not.

When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and anomie.

One use of language is that it partially freed humans from "stimulus control.

When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn't protect somebody from harm, then it can't be morally justified. It's just a social convention.

Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.48

I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.50