Quotes About Freedom

I think I understood intuitively that there was no sustenance for me in the religion of explanation and prohibition.

It must be remembered: fields end freedom. Whatever the astonishing subsequent achievements of civilization, it had a little recognized price: humanity itself became one of its own domesticated species. We enslaved ourselves to conquer.

There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.

To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #7: SOMETIMES, IN ORDER TO GET COMPLETELY SANE, YOU HAVE TO GO A LITTLE CRAZY.

He ran west, away from the rising sun. The wet sand glistened in the morning light and felt spongy beneath his shoes. The tide was out, and the beach sat wide, filled with a fresh assortment of seashells and sand crabs scurrying sideways and jellyfish stranded out of water. Seagulls picked over dead fish, and a pelican stood witness. The wind was down, the sea smooth, and the waves low swells instead of whitecaps. The air was fresh, and the beach was his.

Let your fear go. Release it to the wind. Open your soul. Feel the divine.

The American criminal justice system had long been predicated on a simple belief: 'It's better to let a hundred guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person.' But not anymore. Now the prevailing philosophy was, 'It's better to convict a hundred innocent people than to let one guilty person go free.' Crime had changed America. Americans.

Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note—torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one." —HENRY WARD BEECHER

From a very early age, my wife and I told our son that there are times and places for everything. I told him, look, when you're in class, you have to be quiet and listen to your teacher, but when you go out to the playground, you can scream and be silly.

I lived in small town out in the desert and my friend used to steal his mom's car in the middle of the night. He'd drive over to my house, I'd sneak out and we'd go out to the desert and just burn things down.

A man with a rifle is a citizen; a man without one is merely a subject.

Timothy Keller makes the point well: Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom. (Keller, Walking with God, 47)

Climbing mountains is an act I happen to love, but it is only one form of adventure. There are thousands. In fact, there's one for every human with the passion to push personal boundaries.

This enemy of peace in the world today is unlike any we have seen in the past, and our military is learning from, and building on, previous successes while carrying peace and freedom into the future.

I don't like definitions, but if there is a definition of freedom, it would be when you have control over your reality to transform it, to change it, rather than having it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than.

Michel Foucault reminds us that in societies that organize massively to incarcerate its citizens "there is no outside" for anyone.

The U.S. still confines a higher proportion of its citizens than any other country, and no other nation, in law professor Michelle Alexander's words, "incarcerates such an astonishing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities.

The creation of "new age slaveries" and "racialized caste regimes"[207] in U.S. society should be grounds for change, for revolutionary transformation for any who care about a society and body politic that values freedom in any genuine sense.

Baldwin makes it clear that the man released back onto the streets is "afraid, in fact, to hit those streets," and "to be free to confront his life." He is left by prison "terrified . . . of what life may bring, is terrified of freedom; and is struggling in a trap.

If Christians do not act on a solidarity with criminalized populations, locked-down communities, and with others suffering extrajudicial and judicial violence, they themselves, along with many other citizens who think themselves free from the criminal justice system's negative effects, may find themselves easily caught up in the indignities of today's punishment regime, if they are not already.

Freedom is just another word for wretchedness.

freedom of expression is great for art, but lousy for engineering.

Understand that no one can give you freedom. Freedom is a treasure that must be stolen.