Quotes About Freedom

He's freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven. He's left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom.

I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.

Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held.

part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half–girl Mowgli, half–woman Thoreau.

We are all locked in rooms in different ways, and part of growing up is finding different kinds of keys, and meeting the people who will help free you.

She is walking around the living room naked and

Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering. Trying to run away from suffering is actually to run toward it.

Uniquely in the history of the world, Americans in the late eighteenth century constituted themselves as a people and as a nation in a series of epic and self-conscious acts of democratic self-invention. In 1776, thirteen British North American colonies renounced their common parent and created what would later become the world's mightiest power.

Once you even acknowledge that there is a line, that there are things you shouldn't be allowed to joke about, that there are words that can't be said no matter the context, you're selling out the very idea of comedy.

There are only two kinds of politics. They're not radical and reactionary or conservative and liberal or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men.

freedom. But the two strands, though intertwined, must remain separate in order for the structure of freedom to

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.

The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away—to go, as he concluded, 'anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world!

Sex gets us out of the house and out of ourselves.

We learn, too, that being another's servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.

They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn't free this evening.

wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. The

How pleasant to hold in mind, through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere.

Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society's expectations

Men often want to love, without managing to do so: they seek their own ruin without being able to attain it, and, if I can put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free.

The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons.