Quotes About Freedom

we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic

You said I was a warrior. You told me that was my nature, and I shouldn't argue with it. Father, you were wrong. I fought because I had to. I can't choose my nature, but I can choose what I do. And I will choose, because now I'm free.

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!

There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color--there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

Without an old country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of the American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalties to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say 'set free.' A Jew set free from Jews - yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrilling paradoxical kicker.

It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath's sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense.

No aceptaría la tiranía del nosotros, la cháchara del nosotros y todo lo que el nosotros quiere volcarte encima.

Die wirklich wichtige Freiheit erfordert Aufmerksamkeit, und Offenheit und Disziplin und Mühe und die Empathie, andere Menschen wirklich ernst zu nehmen und Opfer für sie zu bringen, wieder und wieder, auf unendlich verschiedene Weisen, völlig unsexy, Tag für Tag.

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it

Scegli in cosa credere, la vera libertà è la consapevolezza del reale.

What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as heroes and martyrs, 'sacrifices on the altar of freedom'?

What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage.

The banning of books is the greatest statement of both intolerance and stupidity. A country which does this is just giving a lobotomy to itself.

True unity is built upon freedom, not conformity

As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1860, free speech is the "great moral renovator of society and government." Free speech, "of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power."4

That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, hurting only himself. I saw it all happening, then it really did happen. But I didn't understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.

Today I could like anybody, said Rek, smiling. The sky is clear, the wind is fresh, and life tastes very fine. What will you do now? I think I will become a monk and devote my entire life to prayer and good works. No, said Rek. I mean, what will you do today? Ah! Today I'll get drunk and go whoring, said Bowman.

Get rid of your doubts. Yesterday is dead. Past mistakes are like smoke in the breeze.

It is the nature of men to build walls around themselves. They think it will protect them from hurt. It does the opposite. The hurt still gets in, but now it rattles around the walls, unable to get out. So you build more walls. You are now seeing the world without walls. You are free, Ro. Free to hurt and free to heal.

If I am a homosexual, then I am that way by choice.