Quotes About Freedom

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

Sometimes your body feels like a cage for all the stuff inside. You paint your nails, braid your hair, and buy the right kind of jeans, but none of it is really about you.

Social policy that is coercive is the beginning of a police state.

It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.

Smoke, drink and never think.

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul —Mark Twain

Every once in awhile you just have to go out and do something, very crazy and very right, just to dare yourself to live. I don't mean something stupid and destructive, just something fun and good and beautiful.

We all march to the drum,"she murmured."However we are raised, however we are trained, it never seems to leave us. Do you think we can break free?" . . . "We can all learn,"he answered."All grow and change. That choice is ours to make.

My energy comes from freedom and a rebellious spirit.

I don't like to own things, I feel freer when I don't own things. Silence is very important to me. I find being alone rather relaxing.

Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.

I have always considered it despicable to grovel for your life as if life were a favor. If you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living

The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.

Siempre he considerado un acto miserable mendigar la vida como un favor. O se vive como uno desea, o es mejor no seguir viviendo

En los sistemas políticos siniestros, se vuelven siniestras también muchas de las personas que lo padecen; no son muchos los que pueden escapar a esa maldad delirante y envolvente de la cual, si uno se excluye, perece.

Cuba will be free. I already am.

Wem die Fähigkeit abhandengekommen ist, selbstbestimmt zu handeln, ist aber nicht meinesgleichen.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.

At 3 am anything was possible: you could do a handstand on a genever bottle