Best 5891 quotes in «freedom quotes» category

And just at that second, the wind picked up, and thousands upon thousands of yellow sycamore leaves broke from their life support and streamed across the sky. Autumn leaves don't fall; they fly. They take their time and wander on this, their only chance to soar.

And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.

And once and for all; Lincoln knew to his sorrow, further and further, what it meant to love against reason, against hope, against duty, against moral, against promise, against expectation, against any obstacle that could be.

And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fullfilment. you should be free indeed when your days are not without care nor your nights without a word and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked unbound.

And right action is freedom from past and future also. For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. "The Dry Salvages

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I.

And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn't even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams - that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch - except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable.

And so, there in the penitentiary, Juan's education began. He didn't want to be a puto weakling, so he worked hard at learning to read. His earthly body was locked up, but his mind was set free as a young eagle soaring through the heavens.

And suddenly it came to him. That Strawberry Fields garden he'd come from, and the Freedom Tower he'd been thinking of: taken together, didn't they contain the two words that said it all about this city, the two words that really mattered? It seemed to him that they did. Two words: the one an invitation, the other an ideal, an adventure, a necessity. "Imagine" said the garden. "Freedom" said the tower. Imagine freedom. That was the spirit, the message of this city he loved. You really didn't need anything more. Dream it and do it. But first you must dream it.

And then all that has divided us will merge And then compassion will be wedded to power And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind And then both men and women will be gentle And then both women and men will be strong And then no person will be subject to another's will And then all will be rich and free and varied And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old And then all will nourish the young And then all will cherish life's creatures And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.

And then, a strangely comforting thought trickled through me—I had nothing, so I could do anything now. Anything I wanted. I had nothing left to lose.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.... The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

And then she learnt to be a little wild she had to be a little less afraid.

And then there is the most dangerous risk of all - the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

And there was a lot of exclaiming about some Massa Patrick Henry having cried out, 'Give me liberty or give me death!' Kunta liked that, but he couldn't understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him.

And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?

And, when the revolutionary cries that he is fighting for ‘freedom’, be sure to go running away from him just as fast as you can, for you can be damned certain he’s fighting for the freedom to tell you what to do.

And whatever happens next, I know that I am changed. I can no longer defend a king who doesn’t value me, the pawn who faces the enemy front lines. I can no longer fight for my own virtue, a knight who wields her sword in service. And I can no longer hide behind the walls of Gabriel’s castle. I’m a queen in my own right, whether I fall or fight another day, whatever my next move, wherever I land. I have the whole board to consider, every direction available. My fate may not decide the game, but I can go anywhere I want. The queen has freedom the king does not. She decides her own fate

And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.

And yet their reward appear not, and their labor had no fruit: for I have gone here and there through the heathen, and I see that they flow in wealth, and think not upon thy commandments.

An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.

An extreme fearfulness moves through all your body, and your mind is troubled more.

Angelo was a grown man, and here was one thing he was quite free to decide for himself, and yet he was ready to let others make up his mind for him...that could only be stupidity.

An extreme optimism is a condition precedent of Democracy, and democratic scepticism itself is optimist. There is no despair on account of the loss of Truth. It is believed that a mechanical counting of votes must always lead to good results. Behind Democracy stands the optimistic dogma of the natural goodness and loving-kindness proper to human nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the spiritual father of Democracy and it was infected at its roots by his sentimental notions about humanity. It simply will not see that there is also a radical evil in human nature, and does not allow for the fact that the will of the people can follow iniquity, that the majority may be for error and untruth, leaving truth and rightness to a weak minority. There is no guarantee that the general will shall be turned towards the good, that it will seek freedom rather than the complete destruction of freedom. The Revolution in France was begun by the proclamation of the rights and liberty of man; under the Terror all liberty was completely done away with. When, in pure affirmation of itself, the unenlightened popular will refuses to submit itself to any superior being, and claims arbitrarily to direct the destinies of human societies, it easily enters on persecution of Truth, denial of the true, and quenching of all spiritual freedom.

A new era was opening. To worship another god was no longer to be merely different. It was to err. And those who erred were to be seized, struck and – if necessary – wounded. Above all, they were to be stopped.

An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government

Animals cannot have any high thoughts; nor can the Angels or Devas attain to direct freedom without human birth.

An institution rooted in slavery can never set us free.

Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forget fulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.

Anon from the castle walls The crescent banner falls, And the crowd beholds instead, Like a portent in the sky, Iskander's banner fly, The Black Eagle with double head; And a shout ascends on high, For men's souls are tired of the Turks, And their wicked ways and works, That have made of Ak-Hissar A city of the plague; And the loud, exultant cry That echoes wide and far Is: "Long live Scanderbeg!

Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom

An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back impetuously at the sight of the bridle; while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur: so savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke to which civilised man submits without a murmur, but prefers the most turbulent state of liberty to the most peaceful slavery. We cannot therefore, from the servility of nations already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former are for ever holding forth in praise of the tranquillity they enjoy in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace: miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword and death, to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.

Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.

Any day God removes His hand from you, you are finished. Your hope and trust is only in Him. Your confidence, your strength, your power and your life is in God. There is no better life without Him. Look around the world and you will understand me.

Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.

any movement which is worth while, any action which has any deep significance, must begin with each one of us. I must change first; I must see what is the nature and structure of my relationship with the world - and in the very seeing is the doing; therefore I, as a human being living in the world, bring about a different quality, and that quality, it seems to me, is the quality of the religious mind. The religious mind is something entirely different from the mind that believes in religion...A religious mind does not seek at all, it cannot experiment with truth. Truth is not something dictated by your pleasure or pain, or by your conditioning as a Hindu or whatever religion you belong to. The religious mind is a state of mind in which there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever but only what is - what actually is.

Anyone can choose to have success, but only the patient ones will get rewarded by it. Be relentless in chasing your dreams.

Any so-called fetters do not bind youngsters because they have the power and the tactics to break them in their own adroit ways!

Anything can be a curse if it ain't a choice. If it's all you know. If you do it because your father did it. And you do it because it's familiar and safe and you're afraid to do something else. Even if all you want to do is anything else.

Anything that doubt me can´t doubt my God. Any situation that is too high for me can never be too high for my God.

A obediência dos povos alimenta a tirania dos governos.

A part of us always remains when we leave somewhere. It is a part we can never reclaim even if we revisit the place for it was never ours to begin with. There is so little of ourselves that belongs to us. This body is the earth’s. This heart is yours, and his and theirs. The only thing that is our own is our freedom of will— our freedom to choose our attitudes in life. All else is borrowed. All else is everyone else’s.

A person who says “every person has a right to a decent education” may not actually mean “people should be robbed to support bad schools” or “all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.

A prisoner's shackles would always be a lawyers joy.

A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions made by their betters in periodic elections. The "rascal multitude" are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.

A responsible citizen of any society desires no sure paths, just reachable pegs. I need no sure paths; shaky stepping-stones, and perilous pegs will do, for you do not know my way.

Are you free or were you sold a facsimile of freedom?

Aren’t we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it? It not only ensures that we take care of ourselves better than we would if we had to be on top of every decision, but also, by freeing us from having to think about these issues, it gives us the mental space we need to focus on the rest of our lives. This does not absolve us of the responsibility of educating people about public health. We do owe everyone, the poor included, as clear an explanation as possible of why immunization is important and why they have to complete their course of antibiotics. But we should recognize—indeed assume—that information alone will not do the trick.

Are you living in the moment?