Quotes About Freedom

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Nirvana is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas -- joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties.

Where there is a way or a path, it's someone else's way.

Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. "To hell with it," he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.

In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing, and people are living inauthentic lives. "I've never done a thing I wanted to in all my life. I've done as I was told." You know?

No return to the office! No return, anymore, to anything! Her life had cracked and smashed, at last; let it go, let it go.

The society is the enemy when it imposes its structures on the individual. On the dragon there are many scales. Every one of them says Thou Shalt. Kill the dragon Thou Shalt. When one has killed that dragon, one has become The Child.

My heart goes out to the playing and singing folk, the folk who are forever on the roads. Life is change; and to be seeing new wonders every day—the thrown sea, the silver rush of the meadow, the lights in distant towns—is to be living, and not merely existing. I pity the man who is content to stay always in the place where his mother dropped him; that is, unless his thoughts wander. For one might sit on a midden and dream stars!

Land of hope and glory, mother of the free,How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;God, who made thee mighty, make theemightier yet.

All the best stories are but one story in reality--the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

The laws of God, the laws of man,He may keep that will and can;Not I: let God and man decreeLaws for themselves and not for me.

By brooks too broad for leapingThe lightfoot boys are laid.

It is true the precious schoolboy is very nearly ridiculous, but a sacred respect for his proud free self is already growing up within him, a respect for everything that has been corroded in us by spiritual poverty and anxious paternal morality. We must go to the devil.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons.

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.

Bound as our lives are to the tyranny of time, it is through what we know of history that we are delivered from our bonds and escape - into time.

She loved the beauty and the grace of the good old days, but not the rules that kept kids from talking and women from lifting heavy objects if they wanted to. Raleia was beginning to think it would be better to invent a whole new time period where she could pull things from then and now to make the perfect place.

Without limitations, how does one find satisfaction?

Freedom is never given; it is won.

Justice is never given it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.

Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.

is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.