Quotes About Freedom

suffering and freedom have their limits...those limits are very near together.

Be indifferent to other people's opinions about you. Without indifference, you cannot be a free man.

Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form.

But just as the force of gravitation-in itself incomprehensible, though felt by every man- is only so far understood by us as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject, so too the force of free will, unthinkable in itself, but recognized by the consciousness of every man, is only so far understood as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject.

The sense of human freedom, it seems to Tolstóy, is given only to those who have suffered. In

No one knew better than Stepan Arkadyevitch how to hit on the exact line between freedom, simplicity, and official stiffness necessary for the agreeable conduct of business.

He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.

If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

Eu, ao contrário, creio que as duas questões estão indissoluvelmente ligadas - retrucou Piestov. - É um círculo vicioso. A mulher está privada de direitos por falta de instrução e a falta de instrução decorre da ausência de direitos. É preciso não esquecer que a escravização das mulheres é tão grande e tão antiga que nós, muitas vezes, não queremos compreender o abismo que nos separa delas - disse.

A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.

He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom. A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.

i wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. i wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. i felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. i suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time.

A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and ordinary people, have enslaved two hundred millions of vigorous, clever, capable, freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that not the English, but the Indians, have enslaved themselves?

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

Submission to the law created by men makes one a slave; obedience to the law created by God makes one free.

Cualquier acto de un loco, de un borracho o de un hombre excitado se presenta, ante los ojos de quien conoce el estado de ánimo del autor del hecho, como menos libre y más sujeto a las leyes de la necesidad, y más libre y menos sometido a la necesidad a juicio de quien no lo conoce.

there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom.

Napoleon is great because he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all that was good in it—equality of citizenship and freedom of speech and of the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power.

La femme est privée de droits parce qu'elle est privée d'instruction, et le manque d'instruction tient à l'absence de droits. N'oublions pas que l'esclavage de la femme est si ancien, si enraciné dans nos mœurs, que bien souvent nous sommes incapables de comprendre l'abîme légal qui la sépare de nous.

Que ellos vivan como quieran y yo viviré también como me plazca. No puedo ser sino como soy. No es eso lo que quiero, no, no es eso...

It is impossible to imagine to oneself a man who has no freedom otherwise as deprived of life

We Russians are always like that. Perhaps it's our strong point, really, the faculty of seeing our own shortcomings; but we overdo it, we comfort ourselves with irony which we always have on the tip of our tongues. All I say is, give such rights as our local self-government to any other European people—why, the Germans or the English would have worked their way to freedom from them, while we simply turn them into ridicule.

Now then, leave the children to themselves

And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. 'How good and how simple!' he thought. 'And the pain?' he asked himself. 'What has become of it? Where are you, pain?' He turned his attention to it. 'Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be