Quotes About Freedom

when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become "pickers," which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time to choose more and pick less, we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic.

In the modern university, each individual student is free to pursue almost any interest, without having to be harnessed to what his intellectual ancestors thought was worth knowing. But this freedom may come at a price. Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when they may lack the resources to make them intelligently.

Taking care of our own "wants" and focusing on what we "want" to do does not strike me as a solution to the problem of too much choice. It is precisely so that we can, each of us, focus on our own wants that all of these choices emerged in the first place.

AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule.

So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one's autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good...

The player is always trapped in his own play but he must never allow the spectators to suspect this, they must always think that he is free. Thus the great art of the player is not in showing but in concealing.

The soul is the "real" person; the body is a prison.

I form withing myself the utopia of a subject free from repression

Come, butterfly It's late- We've miles to go together.

Eindelijk! De tirannie van het menselijk gelaat is verdwenen en ik zal alleen nog maar door mijzelf lijden.

I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone.

He had stopped drinking, but the need to be free had been just as great...

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are half a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them. The hawk pays no coinage to love or morals.

Right now all he wanted was to get out of this awful place where reality had worn so thin.

Most people are fitted with Lead Boots when they are just little kids and have to wear them all their lives. These Lead Boots are called A CONSCIENCE. I have none, so I can soar high above the heads of the Normal Crowd.

No es una hoja de papel lo que hace a un hombre. Ni la cárcel lo que le deshace.

Algunos pájaros no están destinados a que los enjaulen, eso es todo. Tienen las plumas demasiado brillantes, su canto es demasiado dulce y libre. Así que, o les dejas irse, o, cuando abres la jaula para darles de comer, se las arreglan para escapar volando. Y la parte de ti que en el fondo creía que era un error tenerlos cautivos se alboroza, pese al hecho de que el lugar en que vives sea mucho más lóbrego y triste tras su partida.

It goes back to what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisibility coat, about how he never really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look.

If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. [It is] the dubious luxury of normal men and women.

Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves. There would be no grave for this man, and no more gravity, either. He had been given a special dispensation.

I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don't have any black marks against me before I start.

No me interesa la credibilidad, sino la libertad, y he descubierto que escribir puede proporcionarla.

he travels fastest who travels alone.