Quotes About Freedom

Marriage is like a cage one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out...

Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.

J'accuse toute violence en l'education d'une ame tendre, qu'on dresse pour l'honneur, et la liberté.

We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them.

I have a mind that belongs wholly to itself, and is accustomed to go its own way. Having never until this hour had a master or governor imposed on me, I have advanced as far as I pleased, and at my own pace. This has made me slack and unfit for the service of others; it has made me useless to any but myself.

Death is inevitable: does it matter when it comes? When Socrates was told that the Thirty Tyrants had condemned him to death, he retorted, 'And nature, them!'. How absurd to anguish over our passing into freedom from all anguish.

Meditar previamente sobre a morte é meditar previamente sobre a liberdade.Quem aprendeu a morrer desaprendeu a se subjugar. Não há nenhum mal na vida para aquele que bem compreendeu que a privação da vida não é um mal. Saber morrer liberta-nos de toda sujeição e imposição.

Às vezes é boa escolha nada escolher.

Doya doya yaÅŸamak y?llar?n çokluÄŸuna deÄŸil, sizin gücünüze baÄŸl?d?r.

El sábado pasado, el palacio del Gran Duque estaba abierto y lleno de campesinos para quienes nada estaba vetado, y se bailaba por todas partes en la gran sala. La participación de este tipo de gente es, a mi parecer, una imagen de la libertad perdida, que se renueva así todos los años en la fiesta principal de la ciudad (...).

Il est incertain où la mort nous attende, attendons-la partout. La préméditation de la mort est préméditation de la liberté. Qui a appris à mourir, il a désappris à servir. Le savoir mourir nous affranchit de toute sujétion et contrainte. Il n'y a rien de mal en la vie pour celui qui a bien compris que la privation de la vie n'est pas mal.

Our main enemies are held to be death, poverty and pain. Yet everyone knows that death, called the dreadest of all dreadful things, is by others called the only haven from life's torments, our natural sovereign good, the only guarantor of our freedom, the common and ready cure of all our ills;2 some await it trembling and afraid: others [C] bear it more easily than life.3 [B] One man complains that death is too available:4

It is not certain where Death awaits us, so let us await it everywhere. To think of death beforehand is to think of our liberty. Whoever learns how to die has learned how not to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.xi

away, and she could carry a bag on each arm, providing

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with it's thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything.

After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.

Liberty, far from putting man in possession of himself, ceaselessly alienates him from his essence and his world

soÌ"phrosyneÌ", el estado al que tendemos, mediante el ejercicio del autocontrol y mediante la moderación en la práctica de los placeres, está caracterizada como una libertad.

I am not a writer, a philosopher, or a great figure of intellectual life. I am a teacher. […] My role is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes that have been built up at a certain moment in history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people—that is the role of an intellectual.