Quotes About Freedom

The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.

I also believe that government has no business telling us how we should live our lives. I think our lifestyle choices should be left up to us. What we do in our private lives is none of the government's business. That position rules out the Republican Party for me.

I'm not a machista that tells his girl what she has to put on. I let her be herself.

On the ice, I feel like I can become a different person, and the darker dramatics, the Black Swan, is confident: she's free to do whatever she wants, and that attitude helps in my skating. The White Swan is, I feel, more what I'm actually like off the ice: I'm a lot quieter, and if someone tells me to do something, I'll just do it.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn't tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

The 'Bird's Nest' National Stadium, which I helped to conceive, is designed to embody the Olympic spirit of 'fair competition.' It tells people that freedom is possible but needs fairness, courage and strength.

No one tells salesmen what they can and can't do.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.

It's silly that anyone in this world tells you that there are only certain people that can marry you.

Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it's easier, it scales and it's profitable. But people don't like it - we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.

I just kind of feel like it's my choice to do what I want to do. And my agent, he's totally with it. He tells me, 'You can turn down any audition you don't want to.'

You don't get shouted at at the 'Guardian.' Nobody bullies you at the paper; nobody tells you what to write. Now, I love working in that atmosphere; I am free to research and write what I want.

If someone tells me I can't wear something, that's the moment when I want to wear it.

You have more freedom on radio. When people used to tell me they preferred radio to TV, I always thought they were making the best of things because they couldn't get any telly work, but now I understand, sort of.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.

Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world.

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.

Begin to free yourself at once by doing all that is possible with the means you have, and as you proceed in this spirit the way will open for you to do more.

Perfection is a club I resigned from a long time ago.

In a jungle full of totalitarian monsters liberal democracy needs teeth.