Quotes About Freedom

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

One could think of seagulls. It's really a very simple thing to do… seagulls: past, present and future passing almost like drums to the sky.

It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.

She was a perfect freeway Mona Lisa.

No matter what situation you're in, you always have a choice.

What would happen if you didn't do the thing you "have to" do?

As we discovered during Prohibition, the good the government does by reducing drug use must be weighed against the harm done in supporting the criminal underground that serves this black market, not to mention the loss of individual freedom caused by the state imposing its group morality on everyone.

It is our ability to forget our problems, through the process of thought, rather than the passage of time, that frees us from the circumstances of our past.

If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a precious life. It's a beautiful life. Its something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you're religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don't live this life to the full because you think you're going to get another one. That's an awfully negative way to live a life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully

The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.

You can't get away with saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying, 'It violates my freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all.

The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns, today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less).

If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families, that's up to them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously . . .

The right to be Christian' seems in this case to mean 'the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives.

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

wanted to believe the Darwinian idea. I chose to believe it not because I think there was enormous evidence for it, nor because it had the full authority to give interpretation to my origins, but I chose to believe it because it delivered me from trying to find meaning and freed me to my own erotic passions.

Would gladly trade a limb to live my life free from fear!

Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.

In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo. Decades

Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness – Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il's haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts.

The inescapable lesson of history is that any power given to the state – even when well meaning in intent – will ultimately be abused by the state. Like freedom, non-freedom does not arrive ready-made. It grows, and no soil should ever be made ready for its sowing.

Do we trust the idea of love, no matter how mad – from Don Quixote's love for the farm girl he renames Dulcinea del Toboso to Yossarian's love for the chaplain – because in the face of conformity, the madder the love, in some mysterious way the greater the commitment to freedom?

Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do—if you can.