Quotes About Freedom

By teaching us how to read, they had taught us how to get away.

Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.

Freedom, for Hegel, has to do with identification—how one sees oneself (as citizen, as rebel, as stoic, as master, as slave), it is not the political question of societal restraints and duties.

Between 1902 and 1913, according to his official biography, he was arrested eight times, was sent into exile seven times, and escaped from exile six times.[156] The exile from which he did not escape was the one to which he was sentenced in 1913 and from which he was freed by the February Revolution of 1917.

Man's nature, he postulated, was to be a "free conscious producer," but so far he had not been able to express himself freely in productive activity. He had been driven to produce by need and greed, by a passion for accumulation which in the modern bourgeois age becomes accumulation of capital. His productive activity had always, therefore, been involuntary; it had been "labour.

Private enterprise flourished in much of the economy. Intellectual life was far from completely regimented.[491] The secret police, albeit an object of fear for many, was not operating as the terror machine that it was later to become and was not yet one man's political instrument. Neither the population at large nor the tens of thousands composing the politically influential class could be described (in the language of the theory of totalitarianism) as an "atomized mass.

I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture.

I intend to open this country up to democracy and anyone who is against that I will jail, I will crush."—João Baptista Figueiredo, President of Brazil (1979)

The abortion license has not brought freedom and security to women. Rather, it has ushered in a new era of irresponsibility toward women and children, one that now begins before birth.

Our times might emphasize equality, which we then mistake for the need for everyone to be the same, but what we really mean by this is the equal chance for people to express their differences, to let a thousand flowers bloom.

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity

Preserve the unspoken option of being able to leave at any moment and reclaim your freedom if the side you are allied with starts to collapse.

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for, by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgement, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You are one of a kind. Your combination of skills and experience is not replicable. That represents true freedom and the ultimate power we humans can possess.

Understand this: The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.

What we most deeply desire, however, is to create our world for ourselves. Whenever we can do that, even in the slightest degree, we are happy. Now in play we create our own world...

Preferiría ser mendiga y soltera, que reina y casada. REINA ISABEL I, 1533-1603

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. —Eric Hoffer

Daily Law: It is simple: depending on others is misery; depending on yourself is power.

My policy is to have no policy. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1809–1865

In some people the rider is too strong, holds the reins too tightly, and is afraid to occasionally let the animal go into a gallop.

Nuestra época puede enfatizar la igualdad, que luego confundimos con la necesidad de que todos seamos idénticos, pero su verdadero significado es la igualdad de oportunidades para expresar nuestras diferencias

Not only is a man not obliged to be grateful, gratitude is often a terrible burden that he gladly discards.

Let us rid death of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. . . . It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. . . . He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.