Quotes About Freedom

I think a lot of the shame-based religious and political methodology has more to do with keeping people contained than with setting them free. And I'm no fan of it.

We both have our independence and freedom, but we have those things with each other. It's a paradox, but it works. It all reminded me of what my friend Henry Cloud told me, that when two people are entirely and completely separate they are finally compatible to be one. Nobody's self-worth lives inside of another person. Intimacy means we are independently together.

But love doesn't control, and I suppose that's why it's the ultimate risk.

He said jazz music was invented by the first generation out of slavery. I thought that was beautiful because, while it is music, it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul. It is as if the soul is saying something, something about freedom.

I thought that was beautiful because, while it is music, it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul. It is as if the soul is saying something, something about freedom. I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper. But it is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful.

But then she said something I thought was wise. She said she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver. And because her husband believed she was just a girl, he was free to really love her too. Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life's conflicts. I thought that was beautiful.

The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse.

Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others, it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus they want to share. There is the tension.

Rules are meant to be broken.

The future does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom.

We believe in the American Dream, not in the socialist nightmare.

Brunetti had recently read a book that said a goshawk could see the veins in the wings of a butterfly: who knew what could be seen? Or felt. Possibility was limitless, each of us a separate universe of choice and capacity.

am, as an English poet says in an entirely different context, 'as free as the road, as loose as the wind.'" Brunetti

if you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble. In a way, it's like having a blind person teach Art History, isn't it?

And today, to the best of his knowledge, no one spoke against it, either, but today the silence was based on the belief that slavery had ceased to exist.

When you're in pain, you need to think of something so that at least part of you can be free of the pain, so that your mind can go somewhere where there's no pain.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.

It was the most important night of my life,' he said calmly. 'It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most.' 'Which is?' 'To live without thinking.

To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!

It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap. And somehow I had done it;

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. —ALBERT CAMUS

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn't painting that bird from his mind, you know? That's a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem. And he's right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I'd clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted.