Quotes About Freedom

Still, Lincoln went on to insist, what made the United States different from Europe, indeed what made its democracy possible, was

The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

Amerika'daki rejimler hiçbir zaman özel olarak serbest ticaretle ilgilenmemiÅŸtir. Amerikal?lar özellikle uluslararas? yönetim yap?lar? kurmakla daha çok uÄŸraÅŸm??lard?r.

As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of "Western" freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.64

Nowadays, it's almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democracy to say they are against freedom – at least in the abstract (in practice, of course, our ideas are usually much more nuanced). This is one of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions.

One could in fact interpret this list as a subtle way of saying that the only way of "freeing oneself" from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence that the very notion of canceling the debt and achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the start.

What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're actually more imaginative than we are?

on a political level, where every arbitrary act of power tends to reinforce a feeling that it's not power, but arbitrariness—that is, freedom itself—that is the problem.

a tacit cosmology in which the play principle (and by extension, creativity) is itself seen as frightening, while game-like behavior is celebrated as transparent and predictable, and where as a result, the advance of all these rules and regulations is itself experienced as a kind of freedom.

Those who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.

Zodra mensen zich niet langer iets aantrekken van wat voor politiek realistisch doorgaat, opent zich een heel nieuwe wereld vol mogelijkheden" - interview De Groene Amsterdammer 7/8/2014

A wage-labor contract is, ostensibly, a free contract between equals—but an agreement between equals in which both agree that once one of them punches the time clock, they won't be equals any more.

we are all in the situation of the inmate who prefers working in the prison laundry to sitting in the cell watching TV all day.

ÖrneÄŸin Ä°ngiliz liberalizmi devlet bürokrasisinin azalt?lmas?na deÄŸil, tam aksine yol açm??t?r; özerk bireyler aras?nda özgür sözleÅŸme ÅŸeklindeki liberal rüyay? mümkün k?lan hukuk görevlileri, sicil memurlar?, müfettiÅŸler, noterler ve polis memurlar? kadrolar?n?n durmaks?z?n ÅŸiÅŸmesine.

Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of 'equality before the law', which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation.

When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology18 – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

Let us emphasize (we really shouldn't have to) that Rousseau's effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and lost ages of freedom and equality were in no sense themselves responsible for the French Revolution.

The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.

Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.

In fact, the earliest word for 'freedom' recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means 'return to mother' - because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors' households to return home to their kin.

It seems that whenever there's a word for something everyone agrees to be desirable—"truth," "beauty," "love," "democracy"—then there will be no consensus as to what it really means.

the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.