Best 5891 quotes in «freedom quotes» category

you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?

You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.

You cannot parcel out freedom in pieces because freedom is all or nothing.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom.

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

You can't talk about the environment, you can't talk about political correctness, affirmative action and all the other innumerable things that freedom is about, unless you have a free society based upon the integrity of the individual. If you have a responsible society, these other issues will not come up in a responsible society, and that is what freedom is all about.

You feel like a prisoner if you don't create. You're jailed up inside of yourself.

You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get it. Then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.

You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him.

You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it.

You have to love animals for what they are or leave them alone. The best thing you can do if you love them is leave them alone and see that other people do too.

You know, freedom is a very popular idea, and young people love it, and they're open to ideas. And they like principled answers to our problems.

You may impose silence upon me, but you can not prevent me from thinking.

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

Your freedom to be you includes my freedom to be free from you.

Your freedom is a supreme value. Nothing is higher than that. But your freedom is possible only if you are not encaged in your habits, unconscious patterns of living. Change your gestalt from unconsciousness to consciousness.

Your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

Your life began in the heart & mind of the Infinite. Mentally relive the days when as a child you ran free, when there were infinite possibilities of what you could feel, accomplish, and see in the world. Allow for the energy of your remembered freedom to thunder through you, and you will free your self from the false obstacles your adult.

Your personal freedom to experience yourself and life as you wish is not being limited. Step into your choices and stop telling yourself that you can't, when what you really mean is that you don't want other people to feel the way you think that are going to feel when they see you making the choices you really want to make.

73. ...There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.

You will never meet anyone who admires the American founders more than I do, but they were human, they made mistakes. Perhaps their worst was that their Bill of Rights stops at the border. Inside the US, the federal government has been limited. Beyond the borders, the government has been able to do anything it wanted.

86% if the powerful outlaw life; if they ban love, if they constrict liberty with unjust laws . . . then the dandelions must leap up in defiance, in numbers too vast to suppress, with persistence too determined to stop. And why should they wait for violent means to achieve such a goal, when they could embody that world today?

You took my freedom away a long time ago and you can't give it back because you haven't got it yourself.

Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.

Zen goes directly to your own experience of the oneness of the universe, of your interconnectedness with all things. You learn to distrust whatever you clung to in your old sense of separation, and that realization can be the most liberating thing in your life, a freedom beyond anything you could have imagined.

A bad girl is a myth. Every female exist in the world is equally awesome . You call them bad because they do not act the way you want. You are jealous of the girls who choose freedom over mental slavery.

A black market is the part of a free market that refuses to knuckle under to government oppression.

A book about books is like a poem about poetry: Books are knowledge, paid for, all. Readers - horses in a stall. Stallions should always run. Lest they stale become, in turn. Running waters are most clear. In some books, you disappear – lose yourself, and track of time. How I wish that one was mine... Mine, to have, to write, to read... Mine, just like a flying steed. Mine, forever, - to improve. Would I then, of me, approve? I would not, I can't... myself. I'm but dust, swept off a shelf. Fly, can I, just 'til I'm settled, down, beside my flower, petalled.

(about William Blake) [Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and "imaginative death." And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral." But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." For this "Reason" as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. "For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things." And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against "mere enthusiasm," Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): "Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!

(about William Blake) As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me." And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy." ...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven.

A CALL FOR UNITED WORLD

Access to unlimited funds by a government, not surprisingly, leads to an unlimited government.

À ceux qui ignorent, enseignez-leur [...] Le coupable n'est pas celui qui y fait le péché, mais celui qui y a fait l'ombre.

A child comes from God, a child is a gift from God, but a child is not our possession. Give the child unconditional love and freedom. Respect the child, the child has its own soul. The child has its own way.

A common understanding is the pivot and a common way to bond the disintegrated

A city which belongs to just one man is no true city

. . . a constitution, intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.

A country which is governed by the religious rules cannot be called as a country, but just a big open prison! Where freedom of expression doesn’t exist, where freedom is just a dream, over there nothing exists, nothing but the utter ugliness of a fascist oppression!

Actually, in its essence, democracy is a totalitarian ideology, though not as extreme as Nazism, fascism or communism. In principle, no freedom is safe in a democracy, every aspect of the individual's life is potentially subject to government control. At the end of the day, the minority is completely at the mercy of the whims of the majority. Even if a democracy has a constitution limiting the powers of the government, this constitution too can be amended by the majority. The only fundamental right you have in a democracy, besides running for office, is the right to vote for a political party. With that solitary vote you hand over your independence and your freedom to the will of the majority.

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.

A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.

A forced kindness deserves no thanks

A free spirit is not bound by this, that, matter, materialism or opinion. They sing, dance and flow on the wind - for they are at one with it. They are nothing and everything - void and expanse. Even space and time does not confine or define them. For they are pure energy itself.

A free world doesn't mean a civilized world, for freedom without responsibility leads to more chaos than lack of freedom does.

African leaders must desire to liberates it’s people through intensive education (formal and informal). The African people deserve to be educated.

After I leave the earth my work is anyway going to belong to the world for centuries but till that time I want to work freely.

After publishing The Age of Reason as an old man, Paine was beaten and turned out of his house and away from his town by his fellow citizens to punish him for blasphemy. I had, even then, a little glimmer of how dangerous it actually is for an American to behave like an American. We've never believed a word we've said from the Bill of Rights onward. What conceivable right to we have to feel smug about the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie by fanatical foreigners? We don't do badly with fatwas ourselves.