Quotes About Freedom

And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.

I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute.

Now you know how I fooled you," he would say. "Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn't self-imposed: you are all absolutely free.

An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.

I am not a donkey to be led by the carrot of salvation and the stick of damnation without thinking of where they are driving me and what they are making me do.

I feel great and I send fraternal greetings to Dr. Andrei Sakharov in Russia," said Dr. Leary on emerging from prison, registering the fact that the mechanisms of the police state are the same everywhere, as are the myths that protect them. "Good Russians" believed Dr. Sakharov was a half-crazed alcoholic, just as "Good Americans" believed Dr. Leary was a half-crazed dope-fiend.

1. Thou shalt not force thy neighbor to alter his consciousness. 2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his consciousness.

Neither capitalist indust-reality nor socialist indust-reality have been able to give humanity what most of us really want: liberty and justice, freedom and the abolition of poverty, continued growth and continued security. In looking at capitalism vs. socialism, we are always confronted with a dilemma, not a choice.

NO "EXTERNAL" SITUATION MAKES A MENTAL STATE "INEVITABLE

Whatever is going on around you, your experienced reality-tunnel is still a synergetic product of both internal and external environments (set and setting). You do not "create your own reality," as Pop Mysticism says, but you create the larger part of it by how you evaluate, respond and give "meaning" to what happens. Your freedom is much, much greater than you realize until you start experimenting with alternative reality-tunnels and rapid brain change.

We need to realize that the same technology, wisely used by intelligent men and women, can free us from every form of neurotic and irrational rigidity, to dial and focus our nervous systems as easily as we dial or focus our TV, turning any channel or circuit off and on as we choose. This is what metaprogramming (cybernetic) consciousness means.

I dreamed I called D.A.F. de Sade on the phone and asked him, Jesus told me that he and you agree on at least one thing and it explains freedom. What is that one thing? Quite simple, he replied, don't be afraid of the Cross. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery. And the line went dead with a triumphant click like a barred door falling open.

Researchers don't do certain kinds of research because they don't want to get thrown into San Quentin, as happened to Dr. Leary.

As I sat on death row, reading his work created a doorway that allowed me to walk out of my cell and into a universe of infinite wonder. He taught me how to begin creating my own world, and how to leave behind the mundane and mediocre drudgery that seemed to swallow most people whole.

George has other reasons. "A junkie," George says, "has no choice. He's hooked. But somebody who isn't an addict, somebody who has the freedom to say 'yes' or 'no,' has to be crazy to take a pill or powder admittedly manufactured illegally and put it in his mouth. There is just no way of knowing what you're getting.

There is no government, no industrial-military complex, no economic system, no mass media that can ever reduce us to puppets and robots as thoroughly as the biological and environmental dictatorships have. — F.M. Esfandiary, Upwingers

1. Determine to enjoy this primitive circuit fully from now on. Play with yourself and others and the environment shamelessly, like a newborn baby. Meditate on "Unless ye become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven." (paraphrase of Matthew 18:3)

How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?

Where scientists are legally or otherwise coerced away from certain areas of investigation, people do not all uniformly stop having experiences that such investigation might scientifically explain; people merely resort, by default, to pre-scientific models to explain the experiences.

Try. Thoughts are the one phenomena still private in this world; they won't come around and arrest you at once. You have nothing to lose but mental chains. You might have a world of psychological freedom — creativity — to gain.

Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners . . .

For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.

Mammalian sociobiology, rooted in the antique neural circuits of the old brain, contains many factors opposing the evolution of domesticated primates into true freedom and objective intelligence.

The point is not to get hung up on being what you're supposed to be. If you can, it's good to do what pleases you.