Quotes About Freedom

the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communists, I thought; it was true for all of us.

if you needed a woman, you were weak. Family was restrictive to your male freedoms.

Madiba reminds that democracy is more than just elections.

no matter the circumstances outside ourselves, we always have a choice.

start home, change my mind, pull into the liquor store drive-through, purchase a pint of gin, and head toward the country.

Although I never found a church where I felt completely at home again, I made a new home in the world. I renewed my membership in the priesthood of all believers, who may not have as much power as we would like, but whose consolation prize is the freedome to meet God after work, well away from all centers of religious command, wherever God shows up.

Let the South," I said slowly, "spend every single penny of their treasure, which colored people have earned for them. Let them spill a drop of their own blood for every drop of colored people's blood they've spilled or contaminated. I have no pity and contemplate no mercy for the so-called bleeding Confederacy.

You still don't like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don't marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.

Other people can be annoying, as Sartre famously suggested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self.

No one is morally justified in removing a man from his own soil, taking him to a faraway country and keeping him there by force. And no man is morally entitled to own another.

To be held behind walls, however comfortable the surroundings, is a torment for someone who wants to leave. It is better than a dungeon, of course, but you are not your own master.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

A novel! Why do you say this won't liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see more ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

Questioning our government's actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure

Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be. And in the grip of fresh discoveries, always.

Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he's a monster and goes to this island where it's all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus.

No rational guidelines existed for comparing youthful freedom with the heart-enlarging earthquake of family life.

She never wore a watch, and for this she didn't need one.

don't look for money to buy your life back

We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. We often have the form of liberty, but not the substance