Quotes About Freedom

A character in Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel Freedom puts it this way: "If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.

He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune 500 company, and you'd be happy. He had done all that and he was miserable. He'd gotten out of his father's house only to find another kind of servitude. He decided to start over and do things his own way. He would become an entrepreneur.

Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality and freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which dominant groups subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.

I think there is a heritage which I'm proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country. And my father twice.

After the tragedy, New Yorkers are more united than ever in their vision, as well as in appreciation what living in freedom means - and that if we stand together, we can accomplish anything.

We know that when people are safe in their homes, they are free to pursue their dream for a brighter economic future for themselves and their families.

She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above.

If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

But whether the new would follow the course which the old had followed, that he did not know, and now at last he was almost certain that he did not even desire that the cycle should be repeated. He suddenly thought of all that had gone to build civilization--of slavery and conquest and war and oppression.

A man might befriend a wolf, even break a wolf, but no man could truly tame a wolf.

A true man does what he will, not what he must.

I don't want to have a dozen sons," she had told him, appalled. "I want to have adventures" ~Asha Greyjoy

She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of the horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well.

She was Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Khaleesi and queen, Mother of Dragons, slayer of warlocks, breaker of chains, and there was no one in the world that she could trust.

Free folk don't follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on a tunic," the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. "They won't dance for coins, they don't care how your style yourself or what that chain of office means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow the man.

Si le cortas la lengua a un hombre, no demuestras que estuviera mintiendo: demuestras que no quieres que el mundo oiga lo que pueda decir.

I'm not a lady, Arya wanted to tell her, I'm a wolf.

Something about the howling of a wolf took a man right out of his here and now and left him in a dark forest of the mind, running naked before the pack.

Proud men might shout that they would sooner die free than live as slaves, but pride was cheap. When the steel struck the flint, such men were rare as dragon's teeth; elsewise the world would not have been so full of slaves. There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave, the dwarf reflected. Their choice may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.

Jaime smiled. "I hope you're not thinking of taking the black on us, sweet brother." Tyrion laughed. "What, me, celibate? The whores would go begging from Dorne to Casterly Rock. No, I just want to stand on top of the Wall and piss off the edge of the world.

The most insidious thing about bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it.

He had no choice, he had told her, and then he left, choosing.

I would choose freedom over comfort every time.

Life would be much simpler if men could fuck themselves, don't you agree?