Quotes About Freedom

The patriarchy may have stolen our freedoms, but we don't have to be complicit in the abandonment of our souls.

Your vagina is not a democracy. No one else gets a vote on what you do with it.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.

The suffering of his body is as naught to the joy of being free from the pain of being seen.

For one awful, long moment she is hanging head-downward, wings open, like a turkey in a butcher's shop, only her head is turned right-way-up and she is seeing more than she has ever seen before in her whole short life. Her world was an aviary no larger than a living room. Then it was a box. But now it is this; and she can see everything:

Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:

So often we see solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with nature. But it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.

A sparrowhawk, light as a toy of balsa-wood and doped tissue-paper, zipped past at knee-level, kiting up over a bank of brambles and away into the trees.

I had only just escaped from humanity,' White wrote, 'and the poor gos had only just been caught by it.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk.

To move from darkness to light, from enclosed rooms into the open air, to stand at a distance, first, and then grow closer, over many days, to this alien world of raucous voices and swinging arms, of bright plastic buggies and roaring mopeds. Day by day, foot by foot, mouthful by mouthful, my hawk would come to see that these things were not a threat, and would look upon them with equanimity.

While still a schoolmaster he bought two Siamese cats – a breed renowned for its independence – and tried to 'train them to place no reliance or affection upon anybody but themselves'. It was what he had been trying to do himself for years. 'In vain,' he concluded, with disgust. 'Far from wandering free and independent . . . they sleep all day in the sitting room, in the intervals of mewing at me for more food.

The Dixie Chicks are another obvious absence, and it is hard not to suspect that they are being ostracized from the museum because of lead singer Natalie Maines's criticism of George W. Bush for America's invasion of Iraq in 2003, which provoked a storm of controversy.

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one.

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one. But of course if you take that path you may also find that in the end you're unloved.

Consent is a downward motion, I think - a leap or a fall - and whether they'll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own

I can't explain, maybe it isn't something that needs explaining, how the sight of a broken cage just puts you up on stilts. The promise that the cage will always be empty, that its days as a jailhouse are done.

The skirt flared wonderfully, and there was the sweet ribbon bow at the waist. It was a dress to be worn by the sort of girl who'd check that no one was looking, then skip down a quiet street instead of walking, just so the fun of it was hers alone.

The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due.

Of course this is a mind-set that a nation can be stunned into. All you need is a century or two of freedoms and strictures that appear and disappear between one year and the next, words and deeds that were frowned upon just yesterday receiving vehement acclaim today

I said that as far as I could gather it was a tale about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her.

The only thing that disturbs us here in the village is the foreign soldiers. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, patrolling. They fight us and they try to tell us, in our own language, that they're freeing us.

So everybody lives the way they're told to. The way they have to. Everybody most of the time. Not ever all the time. Hair style, clothing, manner of speech, ideas, cars, houses, and everything. Just like they have to. Even the way we walk. But not all the time. Comes a time when everybody breaks out. And that's the only characteristic of human nature I know of. Not greed, not obedience, not violence, nor any of those things the capitalists would have us believe are intrinsic. Only rebellion.