Quotes About Freedom

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

My life was never intended to be one long slow descent into respectability.

In the history of the world, no censor has ever been looked back on with respect.

I know everyone thinks I'm difficult. It's just that as I've got older I've become less gullible. And that makes me harder to control. I don't listen to my peers anymore, but that's because most of them are either dead or have gone mad, so now I'm free to explore anything I want.

But sometimes you just resent being told what to like.

our imperative to protect life should override all regulations set in place by passing politicians. Everyone needs a place they can call home. It should be as fundamental a right as freedom of speech.

College would be a new beginning, a time when they could both choose to be anything or anyone they wished.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

From Alan Lightman's intricate 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts...and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own...Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

You can't have occupation and human rights.

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.

Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses. . . . If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days.

Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that universal eligibility to be noble, as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all.

Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.

You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.

There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.

Only servility requires the realm of illusion.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

The lawbreaking itch is not always an anarchic one. In the first place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural resistance to coercion. We don't like to be pushed and shoved, even if it's in a direction we might choose to go. In the second place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural sense of the preposterous.