Quotes About Freedom

Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

And most significant, these hordes of nonmotorized tourists, hungry for a taste of the difficult, the original, the real, do not consist solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don't know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children. The one thing they all have in common is the refusal to live always like sardines in a can—they are determined to get outside of their motorcars for at least a few weeks each year.

pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.

Edward Abbey

take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it

For myself I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous

What are you in for, Rev'rend, anyway? Me, son? My body's here but the spirit's free as a bluebird. Okay, then why is your body here? Well now, the Judge he calls it assault. I done hit a man and he falls down. Didn't hit him hard but he falls down like a log. Maybe he wasn't standin very good.

There is a certain primitive attraction in it," Bondi said, "but what about the future? Are we to spend the rest of our lives shooting animals, chewing skins, hiding out from game wardens and county sheriffs?

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

Freedom begins between the ears.

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

Death is release, if you've lived all right.

I dance like the wind.

It's dangerous to tell the truth, truth without power is always dangerous. And we should fight! Freedom's not an idea, it's a passion! If you haven't got it you fight like a fish out of water fighting for air!

Il faut absolument que la Superstition et le Fanatisme fassent place a la Philosophie. (It must necessarily happen that superstition and fanaticism give place to philosophy.) Kings persecute persons, priests opinion. Without kings, men must be safe; and without priests, minds must be free.

But dream not of freedom for the whole while you enslave the parts; the heart must be the centre of the system, the blood must circulate freely everywhere; and in vast communities you behold but a bloated and feeble giant, whose brain is imbecile, whose limbs are dead, and who pays in disease and weakness the penalty of transcending the natural proportions of health and vigour.

Opinion was to be free as air; and in order to make it so, it was necessary to exterminate all those whose opinions were not the same as Mons. Jean Nicot's.

One of the best things in being a criminal is having no schedule.