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Quotes About Freedom

I must settle for freedom in this modern time
~ Leila Aboulela
In the distant past, Muslim doctors advised nervous people to look up at the sky. Forget the tight earth. Imagine that the sky, all of it, belonged to them alone. Crescent, low moon, more stars than the eyes looking up at them. But the sky was free, without any price, no one I knew spoke of it, no one competed for it. Instead, one by one those who could afford it began to sleep indoors in cool air-conditioned rooms, away from the mosquitoes and the flies...
~ Leila Aboulela
If you can't say Fuck you can't say, Fuck the government.
~ Lenny Bruce
Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government.
~ Lenny Bruce
German idealism is a return to the premodern on an 'English' and therefore insufficient basis... the German idealistic concept of freedom is a synthesis of the premodern concept of virtue with the Hobbesian-Lockean concept of subjective right as the morally fundamental fact.
~ Leo Strauss
What is called freedom of thought in a large number of cases amounts to—and even for all practical purposes consists of—the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by the small minority of people who are public speakers or writers. If this choice is prevented, the only kind of intellectual independence of which many people are capable is destroyed, and that is the only freedom of thought which is of political importance.
~ Leo Strauss
By appearing to regard the city's interests, or its freedom and its empire, as immeasurably more important than justice and, indeed, as the most important of all concerns, Diodotus succeeds in making himself trusted. And this success is dependent, of course, upon lying and deception.
~ Leo Strauss
Monarchy by itself stands for the absolute rule of the wise man or of the master; democracy stands for freedom. The right mixture is that of wisdom and freedom, of wisdom and consent, of the rule of wise laws framed by a wise legislator and administered by the best members of the city and of the rule of the common people.
~ Leo Strauss
Let us remember that the authors of the Federalist Papers were still under a compulsion to prove that it is possible for a large society to be republican or free. Let us also remember that the authors of the Federalist Papers signed themselves "Publius": republicanism points back to classical antiquity and therefore also to classical political philosophy.
~ Leo Strauss
In quest'epoca in cui tutto è ritenuto lecito purché sia fatto in piena libertà, e in cui il corpo è considerato un semplice strumento della volontà razionale e autonoma, la repulsione potrebbe essere l'unica voce rimasta in difesa del nucleo centrale della nostra umanità. Le anime che hanno dimenticato come si fa a rabbrividire sono superficiali.
~ Leon R. Kass
Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
~ Leon Trotsky
Sin? What is sin inside the dynamic of family relationships? It is a mystery that began with man. No one can solve it except through his own unique experience. How you feel is human. But do not think it will leave you alone. We are never free of our blood.
~ Leon Uris
Desde el momento en que pisaban el suelo de Israel, aquellos que habían vivido despreciados, pisoteados, disfrutaban de una libertad y una consideración humana que la mayoría jamás habían conocido, y verse iguales a sus semejantes les infundía un valor y una decisión que no tenían equivalente en toda la historia de la humanidad.
~ Leon Uris
Our land has grown a magnificent liberty tree and its fruit is the richest ideal of the human soul. But, we cannot go on forever merely eating the fruit of the liberty tree or it will die. We must begin to plant some seeds.
~ Leon Uris
Bloemfontein
~ Leon Uris
If you remember nothing else, remember this. No crime a man commits in behalf of his freedom can be as great as the crimes committed by those who deny his freedom.
~ Leon Uris
I have tried in my way to be free.
~ Leonard Cohen
a kite is a victim you are sure of. you love it because it pulls.
~ Leonard Cohen
Out in the fog, weary, yet buoyant from the drinks, his mind dulled along with his aches and his energy returning, Tully was free of the sense of impending ordeal that had been with him for weeks. He felt whole, self-sufficient, felt his life had at last opened up and that now nothing stood between him and the future's infinite possibilities.
~ Leonard Gardner
The need for the amendment was obvious. Of the nation's four million slaves at the outset of the war, no more than five hundred thousand were now [15 June 1854] free, and, to his disgust, many white Americans intended to have them reenslaved once the war was over.
~ Leonard L. Richards
survival in Nazi concentration camps "depended on one's ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action
~ Leonard Mlodinow
If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion. If men reject reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition.
~ Leonard Peikoff
When the leading voices of the emotionalist Republic championed "feeling," it was not as a source of knowledge or of human happiness, but of freedom: the freedom from objectivity, method, logic, fact. It was feeling not as an alleged means to truth, but as the nullification of thought.
~ Leonard Peikoff
In an objective approach, force and value are opposites. The goal of a proper society, accordingly, is not to compel truth or virtue (which would be a contradiction in terms), but to make them possible—by ensuring that men are left free.
~ Leonard Peikoff