Quotes About Freedom

He'd been free his whole life, if only he'd known it.

He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off

Nothing made you feel more like a fucking sorcerer than aviating under your own power. Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be.

a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

who hadn't at some point in his life wanted to climb to the top of a sailing ship in full flight?

Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew.

Nothing made you feel more like a fucking sorcerer than aviating under your own power. Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers. Up

The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything. The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered.

She was feeling something—a new feeling. Not even a feeling exactly, more like she wasn't feeling a lot of things that she was used to feeling. She wasn't tired, or bored, or frustrated, or wishing she was somewhere else doing something else. All that was cleared away. She still had basically no idea what was going on, but she knew she was free to be herself, right here, right now, in the moment. She couldn't wait to find out what she was going to feel next.

Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be. That was always part of the problem, Quentin. I felt like I had to be interested in you all the time. You wanted love so desperately, and I thought it was my job to give it to you. Poor little lost boy! That's not love, that's hell. And I was getting a taste of heaven. I was a blue angel now.

One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely.

For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.

Read the books they don't want you to. That's where the good stuff is.

The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law of the land, and we ignored the law.

Like many philosophers, I reject the idea that free acts must be uncaused; freedom is not only consistent with but demands determinism. Were actions not caused by antecedent factors, including preferences, an agent himself would not know what he was about to do and could be surprised by his freedom. Free choice might go against the agent's own stable values, a nightmare caricature of autonomy.

I never subscribe to the stay-at-home policy. I'm not sick of the road or sick of eating in good restaurants around the country. I like to travel.

We were in our early twenties, playing and traveling, and didn't have to answer to anybody. It was the kind of life where if you had a problem today, you could be five hundred miles away from it the next day.

The only people who object to escapism are jailers.

Time is the very lens through which ye see -- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope -- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what's at stake isn't a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

To conceive of an education as a commodity (as if it were a polo pony or an Armani suit) is to construe the idea of democracy as the freedom of a market instead of a freedom of the mind. I can understand why the mistake is both easy and convenient to make, but unless we stop telling ourselves that America is best understood as the sum of its gross domestic product, we stand little chance of re-imagining our history or reengineering our schools.

In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.