Quotes About Freedom

Sleep nourishes, sure, but it also absolves, removing the demands of the daily, the duties and tasks, and the pesky need to exist.

She had already decided that, when she grew up, she was going to do whatever she pleased and not let anyone order her about.

What she loved was being admired, being wanted, being pursued—but she did not think she wanted ever to be caught.

peoples who have been waiting for their independence for a century, fighting for it for a generation, can afford to sit out a presidential term, or a year or two in the life of an old man in a hurry;

Talking about history is not like living it, I guess. Some people have more choice than others.

She shook her head. "I won't go." His chuckle had absolutely no humor in it. "You say that as if you have a choice." "There is always a choice.

What birds are these wildgeese—flying from precincts where the earth and oceans end— with their enormous wings and speckled throats?

Prose is sending poets to prison. Poetry is the poet in prison secretly composing poems by heart, going right on with the truth.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

In the tightest communities, at least since the days of Odysseus, there is something in man that wants out and senses that his development is stunted by being just a part of a whole, rather than a whole itself. And in the freest and most independent situations men long for unconditional attachments. The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man.

The regime established here [in the U.S.] promised untrammeled freedom to reasonnot to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion.

In the new order a Locke was freewith almost no danger of being interfered withto think his sublime thoughts, to seek the first causes of all things, to understand the nature of things. He could talk with his friends and teach the young. And there was money enough. The academies and universities satisfied Socrates demand to be fed in the prytaneum.

Dios Todopoderoso, no me dejéis sucumbir a la tentación que tengo de cometer una falta. Espíritus buenos que me protegéis, desviad de mí este pensamiento malo y dadme fuerza para resistir a la sugestión del mal. Si sucumbo, habré merecido la expiación de mi falta, tanto en esta vida como en la otra, porque soy libre de elegir.

He felt poor, as well, although he didn't consider himself poor. He considered himself free.

America's fighting men and women sacrifice much to ensure that our great nation stays free. We owe a debt of gratitude to the soldiers that have paid the ultimate price for this cause, as well as for those who are blessed enough to return from the battlefield unscathed.

refusal to abide by the rules of democracy

that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. …

This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of black enslavement.

On the side of the Union," Lincoln said, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.70

Wouldn't that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say 'I never want to smoke again', then spend the rest of your life saying 'I'd love a cigarette.' That's what smokers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have.