Quotes About Freedom

If time travel is the ultimate personal freedom, then it's also the ultimate personal responsibility.

I'm trying to give you two things here, Douglas: the trip I've always promised you, and the chance you never had before on how you want your life to turn out.

I pushed myself off and sailed out of the room. It's hard to slam a door in free fall, don't even try. You can't even swim away with an attitude. It just doesn't work. The best you can do is swim away, scowling.

I'd rather know I can trust you. So before you read what's in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn't too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good.

Without consciousness of contradiction, southern masters cast their defense of slavery in libertarian terms, and demanded the freedom to enslave.

To a modern mind, hegemonic liberty is an idea at war with itself.

From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, six generations of American scholars were mostly Whig historians of their nation. Their work tended to center on ideas of liberty and freedom, equal rights and republican self-government. Major themes were the triumph of those ideas and institutions over tyranny and slavery.

One pro-slavery writer in New York spoke for many slave owners when he said that emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves would be "the total subversion of OUR liberties.

I had a couple of restaurants, nothing too grand. But I'd already worked out – I'm not an idiot – you either run money or else it runs you. If you keep your money … if you're frightened to spend it, you become its prisoner. OK, sure, when you're making it, be as mean as you like. But when you spend it, just give. Give. Show your contempt for it.

The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world.

What separates Rand from Marx is that the latter saw the true flourishing of individual creativity as best accomplished through collaboration and association with others in a collective drive to abolish the barriers of scarcity and material necessity beyond which, Marx held, the true realm of individual freedom could begin.

those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements

He was determined to take the first flight out, wherever it went. Anywhere had to be better than this.

Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.

From the moment of its founding Americans began freeing their slaves—some 500,000 by the early 1800s—and in 1808 outlawed the slave trade entirely.

The regime of social justice, of which the left dreams, is a regime that by its very nature must crush individual freedom.

The future is a work of prejudice and malice inextricably bound with generosity and hope. Its fate is unalterably out of our control. Insofar as this work is manageable at all, it is carried out now and forever under the terrible anarchy of freedom that God has imposed on his children and will not take back.

Islamophobia is the perfect totalitarian doctrine as it is the first step in outlawing freedom of speech — and therefore freedom itself — in the name of religious tolerance.

all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons' cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Trump broke free of this constraint, and it is safe to say that political correctness will never have the stranglehold on public discourse that it once did.

That theme is individual freedom. The economic redistribution that progressives demand is not "fairness," as they maintain. Socialism is theft and a war on individual freedom.

In a free society composed of unequal individuals, the drive to level the playing field is a totalitarian desire and a threat to freedom because it empowers government to confiscate the talents and earnings of some for the benefits of those it favors.

Of course, the political history of the United States is exactly the reverse. It is in large measure the history of a nation that led the world in eliminating slavery, in accommodating peoples it had previously defeated, in elevating nonwhites to a position of dignity and respect, in promoting opportunities and rights to women, and in fostering a healthy skepticism towards unworthy leaders and towards the dangers inherent in government itself.

David Horowitz