Quotes About Freedom

The Chinese foreign ministry has said more than once that I am a free person. Did I do anything wrong by leaving my home?

Majorities and minorities cannot rightfully be taken at all into account in deciding questions of justice.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.

When you're in the minority, it doesn't matter what you're agenda is, you're not going to have the degree of freedom that you have as a member of the majority.

The right of a minority is so important in a democracy.

When I was a kid, I never thought about anything. Never had to think about where I was going to school or what I was going to do. I just lived minute to minute.

Fear is an element that prevents us from letting go. We're fearful that if we let go we'll have nothing else to cling to.

Freedom is a practice and a habit. We have to train ourselves to walk as a free person, sit as a free person, and eat as a free person. We need to train ourselves how to live.

Most of us walk without chains, yet we aren't free. We're tethered to regret and sorrow from the past. We return to the past and continue to suffer. The past is a prison. But now you have the key to unlock the door and arrive in the present moment. You breathe in, you bring your mind home to your body, you make a step, and you arrive in the here and the

The past is no longer a prison for me. The future is not a prison either. I am able to live in the here and now and

At the moment of his awakening at the foot of the bodhi tree, the Buddha declared, How strange—all beings possess the capacity to be awakened, to understand, to love, and to be free, yet they don't know it and they allow themselves to be carried away on the ocean of suffering.

CONCEPTS AND IDEAS are incapable of expressing reality as it is. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, cannot be described, because it is free of all concepts and ideas. Nirvana is the extinction of all concepts. It is total freedom. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, or God, is of the nature of no-birth and no-death.

No coming, no going no after, no before. I hold you close, I release you to be free I am in you And you are in me

The second way of practice is to remove the discrimination that comes from dualistic thinking, that separates inside from outside; ourselves from others; the subject from the object; the spiritual from the material. With no more dualistic discrimination, we have an immense freedom that is nirv??a.

Many Christian mystics talk of God as the absence of burning and discrimination. They do not see God as something external to themselves. They no longer look for God outside of themselves, but recognize God as the freedom and happiness that is available within their own consciousness. When the flames of desire and hatred no longer burn, and the sword of discrimination no longer divides, that is God.

We do not receive nourishment or lasting contentment from indulging in sense pleasures. When we are obsessed by sense pleasures, we lose our freedom.

Our tendency is to think that if we let go, we'll lose the things that make us happy. But the opposite is true. The more we let go, the happier we become.

if we are free of the past, free of the future, we can touch the kingdom of God, the Pure Land of the Buddha, with every step.

When we walk, we can walk for our ancestors and future generations. Maybe they had to walk with sorrow; perhaps they were forced to march or migrate. When we walk freely, we are walking for them.

Open all the doors. Don't commit yourself to just one idea of happiness. Remove the idea of happiness that you have, and then happiness can come, this afternoon.

If we stop being joyful and stop singing, we are caught in a kind of prison. The stars in the sky never build prisons.

Love is not a kind of prison. True love gives us a lot of space.

The reality is that the past is gone; all that's left of it now is impressions or images lingering in the depths of our consciousness. Yet these images from the past continue to haunt us, block us, and otherwise influence our behavior in the present, causing us to say and do things we don't really want. We lose all our freedom.