Quotes About Freedom

hierarchical cultures of business and the state, where status determines access to information, and criticism is met with punishment. Nearly all of us work in hierarchies. Nearly all of us bite our tongues when we should speak freely. Yet few of the classic or modern texts on freedom of speech discuss freedom of speech at work, even though, as the crash of 2008 showed, self-censorship in the workplace can be as great a threat to national security as foreign enemies are.

The crash of 2008 ought to have thrown a bucket of cold water over the excited futurologists. Open societies suffered far more than closed regimes. A member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was entitled to wonder why Americans were telling him he must allow free speech when China was booming and the First Amendment had not stopped debt-laden America going through a deep recession.

In Britain today friends of mine live like dissidents in a dictatorship. They meet in secret. They vet new arrivals to ensure they are not spies. They are ex-Muslims living in a supposedly free country who fear their enemies will damn them as apostates and kill them. How extraordinary that they must hide their true beliefs from all but intimate friends for fear of the consequences. And how shameful that they have no anti-fascist Left worthy of the name to defend them.

The editor of a Danish newspaper wonders why comedians, who boast of their willingness to 'transgress boundaries' and 'speak truth to power', will mock Jesus but not Muhammad. He invites Danish cartoonists to satirise the Prophet. Most respond by satirising the editor. It makes no difference. They still have to spend the rest of their lives under police protection.

Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced the threat of violence, ordinary political categories collapse.

here is something strange. Between the fatwa and the present, religious killers have murdered just one Western artist – the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 for making a film with the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet in the same period Western culture changed, and not for the better.

Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts.

After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves.

peaceful civil disobedience can work in oppressive societies that nevertheless allow protesters to protest.

American Supreme Court intervened, and its decision in the 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is one of those rare moments in history when freedom of speech made an unequivocal advance.

As in America and Europe, British bookshops withdrew the novel in the face of threats – two independent bookshops on the Charing Cross Road were bombed, as were Penguin bookshops and a department store.

There also needs to be a clean break with totalitarianism: both totalitarian regimes abroad and the totalitarian left – if it is still a left – at home. It is incredible that this point needs to be reiterated after the twentieth century; astonishing that we need to go through all that again.

Over and again, you allow the hard logic of the market to usurp human choice and so you create a society with the morality of an anthill, where all human life is reduced to labour, all freedom flattened by the demand for efficient production, all weakness punished, all violence justified, where schools and hospitals are cut while crime and alienation flourish and millions are thrown into the deep pit of unemployment.

How does it feel? To be in love?' 'It feels like all the life is bubbling up in me and spilling from my mouth, it feels like my lungs are on fire and my heart is a hammer, it feels like I can do anything in the world!

I was born to sail away, into a land of forever, not to be tied to an old stone grave, in your land of never.

I woke early like a condemned man to the naivety of birdsong.

Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?

I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be.

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

In a sense, it's all about running away. I've been running all my life. Where I'm going … Who the fuck knows? But that's not the point. The point is just to see how long you can keep going strong. And right now there is no end. The way I feel now, I can keep going for a long time.

We just see Happy Mondays as this licence to do what we want right now as much as possible.

don't believe in the fuckin' work ethic. This "work is what life's all about" shit is just a bunch of bollocks, it's just a fuckin' English bourgeois guilt trip invented by the fuckin' English bourgeoisie to keep people in line, y'know, like a bunch of happy fuckin' slaves. Bourgeois guilt means fuckin' nothin' to me.

See, I'm not trying to write. It just comes out when it comes out. So there is no block! Like, I'm not sitting down, going [frantically], "Oh my God, I've got to write a song! I really, really have to … Oh my God!" Hey, if I don't write a song, I don't record a song. Hell, it just gives me more time to do other things.