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Quotes About Freedom

The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight
~ Vladimir Nabokov
What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
~ Vladimir Nabokov
The few times I said to myself anywhere: 'Now that's a nice spot for a permanent home,' I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Why do you live in hotels? -It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, it confirms me in my favorite habit-- the habit of freedom.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
The past was safe in its cage. Why not have a look?
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Readers are born free and ought to remain free.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man -- free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
What he really wanted was to tear a hole in his world and escape.
~ Vladimir Nabokov Signs and
Zij kon zich niet overgeven aan een plan dat ze niet zelf had gemaakt, aan een koers die een ander voor haar bepaalt.
~ Vonne van der Meer
Arms in the hands of the Negro aroused fear both North and South. Not that the Negroes could not and would not fight, for these same blacks, largely under their own officers, had beaten back Louisiana whites at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend. But, it was the silent verdict of all America that Negroes must not be allowed to fight for themselves. They were, therefore, dissuaded from every attempt at self-protection or aggression by their friends as well as their enemies.
~ W E B Du Bois
It's not about the win or the loss; if we're here to experience, then we are free.
~ W. Timothy Gallwey
Freedom from stress does not necessarily involve giving up anything, but rather being able to let go of anything, when necessary, and know that one will still be all right. It comes from being more independent—not necessarily more solitary, but more reliant on one's own inner resources for stability.
~ W. Timothy Gallwey
The awareness instruction, on the other hand, asks only one thing of the conscious mind: Pay attention to what is happening. There is no doubt because there is no right way or wrong way, and there is no fear of failure because there is no externally implied standard for success. Yet the body learns because it is now free to focus on what feels good and to see for itself what works.
~ W. Timothy Gallwey
The black women of America have as much right to all rights as white women have, without putting on any foreign robes to get them. I love Africa, but I was born in Florida, U.S.A., America. Of my African blood I am proud, but I want American rights. Of my black face I have no shame, therefore I have the right to want the right to show my face anyplace in America any other folks show their face.
~ Langston Hughes
Don't you believe in nonviolence?' I asked. "'Yes,' said Miss Minnie, 'when the other parties are nonviolent, too. But when I have just come out of a funeral parlor from looking at a little small black boy shot three times by a full-grown cop, I think it is about time I raised my pocketbook and strike at least one blow for freedom.
~ Langston Hughes
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, & life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
~ Langston Hughes
I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom whem I'm dead.
~ Langston Hughes