Quotes About Freedom

Man's knowledge of freedom, Kissinger argued, must come from an inner intuition.

Only through the personal awareness and "inward conviction" that we each have of our own freedom, Kissinger concluded.

On the other hand, he stressed in scores of letters and statements that Americans should not let the fear of communism cause them to surrender the civil liberties and freedom of thought that they cherished. There were a lot of domestic communists in England, but the people there did not get themselves whipped into a frenzy by internal security investigations, he pointed out. Americans need not either.

The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life—that is the heart of existentialism.

I am impassioned for independence; I sacrifice all for it … and am tortured more by all the smallest strings than others are by chains.—XXI, 88.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we're feeling liberation we know that there's somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.

had a girlfriend named Lana who told me she loved me but said that her impression of life was that people should live alone, answerable to no one. This, she said, made love a true choice and not a duty that inevitably transmogrified into spite.

I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince.

I know how bad a thing it is to be a slave and I know how terrible it was but I don't believe that there's a free person in the whole world that knows how good a cup full of water can taste. Because you have to be a deprived slave, to be kept waiting for your water like we were to really appreciate how good just one swallow can be. When we finally got a drop on our tongues it was like something straight from the hands of the Almighty.

They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign.

Maybe that's what they're afraid of. Maybe they don't want these children to make up their own minds. Maybe if they did that, the world would change.

If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.

existentialist

I was living out the dream of emancipation—a free man in America, desperate for someone to rein me in.

We all owe out something, Easy. When you owe out then you're in debt and when you're in debt then you can't be your own man. That's capitalism.

The question is,' John added, 'if a person inside a culture has no knowledge of his place in the unfolding of that culture, or in the history of any other people, and if no one else among either the oppressors or the oppressed has that knowledge, can that person be said to be alive? Indeed on what plane could he possibly exist except as chattel where he is a slave or not?

That was the hippie age, and truth was in movement and bodies and actions.

Somewhere along the way I had developed the feeling that I wasn't going to outlive the adventure I was having. There was no way out but to run, and I couldn't run, so I decided to milk all those white people for all the money they'd let go of. Money bought everything. Money paid the rent and fed the kitty. Money was why Coretta was dead and why DeWitt Albright was going to kill me. I got the idea, somehow, that if I got enough money then maybe I could buy my own life back.

If the river were whiskey and I was a diving duck . . .

Most Americans wouldn't understand why two well-dressed men would have to explain why they were standing on a public street. But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage.

I had a girlfriend named Lana who told me she loved me but said that her impression of life was that people should live alone, answerable to no one. This, she said, made love a true choice and not a duty that inevitably transmogrified into spite.

Letting her go freed me. The dog of my heart didn't want that freedom but my soul, whatever that is, yearned for it. I was that tiny ant, mindlessly repeating the mantra of life