Quotes About Freedom

Freedom is being content to be where you are.

Any place you don't want to be, no matter how comfortable, is a prison for you.

Give up everything, even peace.

If its liberation is not human enough to include the liberation of women it will not be liberation

liberation is about human flourishing. It is about creating systems that do not limit the ability of human beings to flourish, to reach their highest potential.

This American system of ours . . . call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.

Today I will masterbate! Okay, that was a mistake. I should have written "Today I will masterbate--if I want to!

Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.

If Charlton Heston can have a constitutional right carry a rifle, why can't grandma have a constitutional right to health care?

Le New York Observer s'était déjà demandé s'il serait un jour possible de voir un homme noir libéré sous caution dans le cadre d'un procès pour meurtre, et je devais bien admettre que non.

The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which...lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life.

In the Bible, man is only free to submit or be damned. His one freedom is the renunciation of that freedom. He finds his "salvation" by freely accepting his subjugation. The Christian ideal, says Saint Paul, is to be freely "subservient to God" (Romans 6:22).

As man has managed to turn himself into a player of the world, the sole thing that can now prevent him from using all his possibilities of playing, is to make him believe that he did not invent the rules of the game.

The opposite concept of the Latin religio should be sought in the Latin verb negligere. To be religious is synonymous with responsibility, not neglect. To be responsible is to be free—to possess the concrete means of exercising free action. At the same time, to be free is also to be connected to others by a common spirituality.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

Les murs s'effritent : l'actualité force les portes du temple, la liberté des Modernes s'invite dans les cours de récréation et des salles de classe, le présent ne s'oublie jamais, les envies de la vie envahissant l'institution, la société, avec ses codes, ses modes, ses marques, ses emblèmes, ses objets fétiches, ses signes d'appartenance et de reconnaissance, déferle à l'école. (p49)

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.

Doesn't that look beautiful after ten years without a beer?

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.

Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.

The corruption at the heart of Communist ideology lay in the means. Social justice, greater freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and alienation are noble, humane ends. What compromised them fatally was the inhuman methods employed to achieve them. This was as true of Lenin and Trotsky as of Stalin.

It is not insult from another that causes you pain. It is the part of your mind that agrees with the insult. Agree only with the truth about you, and you are free.

Anything you believe you have to do or become before you can be free is a denial and distraction from the truth that you are already free.

I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out.