Quotes About Freedom

The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use.

We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another-that surely would be to have life more abundantly.

I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer. And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided than we are—both against each other and within ourselves. Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship. Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy.

The corporate approach to agriculture or manufacturing or medicine or war increasingly undertakes to help at the risk of harm, sometimes of great harm. And once the risk of harm is appraised as "acceptable," the result often is absurdity: We destroy a village in order to save it; we destroy freedom in order to save it; we destroy the world in order to live in it.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. . . . One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. ("The Pleasures of Eating," 1989)

it cannot be allowable for the government, on the pleading of some of the people, to establish a right solely for the purpose of withholding it from some other people. If this were to happen, it would amount to a punishment imposed on a disfavored group for no crime except their existence. I don't need to point out that this has happened before.

He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

the modern world abounds with heralds of a better future and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeats was silly like us or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress--and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please.

The university thought of itself as a place of freedom for thought and study and experimentation, and maybe it was, in a way. But it was an island too, a floating or a flying island. It was preparing people from the world of the past for the world of the future, and what was missing was the world of the present, where every body was living its small, short, surprising, miserable, wonderful, blessed, damaged, only life.

Oh, it ain't mine. I don't own anything I can't carry or that won't follow me when I whistle.

In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

There is no good reason for the government to treat homosexuals as a special category of persons.

The people on the train with me don't know it, but in my head I'm dancing.

Having lost and regained her freedom in the most extraordinary circumstances over the course of her remarkable lifetime, few could have set a higher price on the value of liberty. And yet, as she was well aware, it was only through the fundamental principles of justice that her liberty had finally been secured.

As is said in the film Jacob's Ladder, "The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they're not punishing you, they're freeing your soul. If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my BARBARIC YAWP over the roofs of the world

While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.

At the same time, I felt a surging release and a sense of freedom, like a man who bursts at last gasp out of a drowning sea.

Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

attempt to escape

wisdom of the outdoors, until

relinquish him. From then