Quotes About Freedom

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

It must be a poor life that achieves freedom from fear

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.

The river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we. For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom in the sea.

There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry dock, a ship with freedom of the seas.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

Luther was horrified. Partly this was because, for all his spiritual radicalism, he was deeply socially conservative. His instinct was to obey rightful authorities, to respect social hierarchies, and to preserve good order. For him, Christian freedom meant inner liberation, not political upheaval.

Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I don't know about birds nor do I know the history of fire. But I believe that my solitude should have wings

Señor, la jaula se ha vuelto pájaro.

Ella es una prueba más de que la libertad absoluta de la criatura humana es horrible.

Tampoco creo en la moral: la moral es la gramática del deseo.

No pudiendo respirar, asfixiándome en mi yo, imagino la muerte como un lugar en donde no necesite hacer tan horrorosos esfuerzos.