Quotes About Freedom

Mais la magie vient du pouvoir du bien, de cette force qui nous dit que nous n'avons pas besoin de nous soumettre aux limites et restrictions que nous impose M. destin, comme l'appelle Nabokov.

La mia generazione aveva assaggiato la libertà individuale e l'aveva perduta; per quanto questo fosse doloroso, c'era comunque il ricordo a proteggerci dal deserto del presente. Le nuove generazioni, invece, su che cosa potevano contare? I loro desideri, la loro voglia di esprimersi si manifestavano nei modi più bizzarri.

Right now books are in danger. One can go a step further and say that imagination and ideas are in danger, and whenever they are threatened, we know that our reality is similarly in danger.

the hostility of tyrants to imagination and ideas—is as relevant as ever.

Only if I take my own life can I act without my husband's permission, she said, desperately and dramatically.

And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.

Things are definitely better for men, said Azin. Look at the marriage and divorce laws; look at how many so-called secular men have taken second wives. Especially some of the intellectuals, said Manna, those who make the headlines with their claims about freedom and all that.

Lolita's image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars.

I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions.

He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his "independence of thought," which enabled the artist to enjoy the "aggression of infinite modes of being.

Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?

Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away.

Remember all that talk of yours about how the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?

Yoga allows you to find a new kind of freedom that you may not have known even existed.

You do not need to seek freedom in a different land, for it exists with your own body, heart, mind, and soul.

There is no progress toward ultimate freedom without transformation, and this is the key issue in all lives.

We went down into the dungeons where the captives were held. There was a church above one of the dungeons -- which tells you something about saying one thing and doing another. (Applause.) I was -- we walked through the Door Of No Return. I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom.

Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals? If so, do we really believe that our notions of self-government and individual freedom, equality of opportunity and equality before the law, apply to everybody? Or are we instead committed, in practice if not in statute, to reserving those things for a privileged few?

Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?

Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.

He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.