Quotes About Freedom

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

Don't be afraid - if you don't exercise your rights, you will lose them.

The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them when they are invaded.

I've got my interests and my life experiences as I'm putting lyrics together. And if you start looking at patterns, you start thinking, 'Well, what am I really singing about here?' A lot of it seems to be a battle for some freedom against oppressive forces. That seems to be a theme in a lot of the albums I've done.

My main theme as a songwriter seems to be a feeling of homelessness, of being in motion. The feeling of being somehow unmoored, a radical internal freedom that is very painful and also joyful.

I'm not that sort of writer where I can restrict myself to a theme, just in case nothing good comes of it.

They've all been held captive, of their own free will, of course, and yet when set free, they are lost.

You don't need approval and you don't need an excuse or explanation for living your own life. Remember that." Oh,

Oregon, because

It was a long time before she relaxed and even began to enjoy life. To let herself enjoy life.

Why couldn't she just let herself go?

Full and aching and tingling and spiraling, hanging on for dear life, letting go of every other thought and focused only on one thing—let it go, let it go, let it go.

Mountains pulled and pushed, wind roared down chasms. I followed eagles suspended from cloud horizons. I wanted to fly in the unlimited blue of the morning.

To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and

desert time refused to structure itself. It preferred instead to flow in curlicues, vortices and tunnels,...

To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble.

You can't censor people's dreams.

You can always tell when it's Friday. There's an excitement specific to Fridays, coupled with relief that another week has passed

Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.

It was about being able to dance like Cassidy did, as though no one was watching, as though the moment was infinite enough without needing to document its existence. And so I closed my eyes and tried.

You'll never escape the panopticon thinking like that.

So I went to sleep thinking of her, of the curve of her back in a light cotton dress, of her hair twisted up into its crown of braids, of her, leaping from the zenith of the plastic swing set and clearing the sandbox, turning a neat lap around the whole of Eastwood, California, while I stood there, trapped in the dreariness of it all, numbly watching.

You can sound your barbaric yawp over the rooftops . . . or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . . or seize the day . . . or sail away from the safe harbor . . . or seek a newer world . . . or rage against the dying of the light

And the concept of an extraordinary means of preserving life, or a risky, optional treatment that doctors don't recommend, is one I studied in graduate school and fascinates me to this day. It's the idea that the patient ultimately controls their own fate, and that is the greatest freedom you can have within a system that sees patients as their diagnosis rather than as people