Best 5891 quotes in «freedom quotes» category

We sit in silence for a minute. Thinking about the freedom we don't have and the future we can't control.

We someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

We should tend our freedom wisely.

Western capitalist society, and especially my own American society, is one characterized by great inequalities. In any such society, by the nature of the case, the greatest threat to rightful freedom is always the wealth and power of the privileged. The chief task of the state in protecting human freedom should always be to use rightful state coercion to limit the freedom of the powerful and privileged to infringe the rightful freedom of the less privileged and the vulnerable. Political struggles in the modern world are usually fundamentally struggles about whether state power will be used to protect the rightful freedom of all, or instead used to protect the wrongful freedom of the wealthy, powerful, and privileged. Wide social inequality necessarily indicates that these struggles have come out the wrong way, on behalf of the unjust and oppressive freedom of the privileged against the rightful freedom of the majority.

Western "freedom" is a sophisticated form of control.

We suddenly arrived in this very lost and strange city. Somewhere in the middle of the mountains. We didn't know where we are. We were just heading back to the sea. When we walked trough the forgotten city in silence, something inside us changed. We lost a bit of ourselves too and gained space for something new.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

We too have unalterable convictions. We too have principles we’re willing to fight for, die for, kill for if you like or if you insist. Don’t mistake our pluralism, our tolerance and our multiculturalism for weaknesses. We have convictions and principles and we can be offended as well, we can be offended.

We've got this weird dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility.

We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both.

We were enjoying one of those rare summers of utter freedom – no financial responsibility, no debts, no time owing to anybody.

We who live by writing and publishing want — and should demand — our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. It’s name is freedom.

We will never achieve freedom - not until the very end - but the fight can be so beautiful.

We wouldn't have to take your rights away if you'd just stop exercising them.

Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.

What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.

We will remember the way things used to be, and teach our children to be better than us. The generations that follow will remember with us. In that day, we will all be free

We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.

What about the virtue of letting others be themselves? Is this not the greatest virtue of all?

What are the path of love and the path of meditation? There are basically two different paths to enlightenment. These two paths are The path of love and The path of meditation. The path of love is the female path to enlightenment and The path of meditation is the male path to enlightenment. The path of love is the path of love, joy, relationships, devotion and surrender. The path of meditation is the path of meditation, silence, aloneness and freedom. These two paths has different ways, but they have the same goal. Through love and surrender the person that walks The path of love discovers the inner silence. Through meditation and aloneness the person that walks The path of meditation discovers the inner source of love. These two paths are like climbing the mountain of enlightenment through different routes, but the two paths are meeting on the summit of the mountain - and discover an inner integration between love and meditation, between relating and aloneness. Before I accept to work with a student now, I make an intuitive and clairvoyant evaluation about which spiritual paths that the student has walked before in previous lives. This intuitive assessment gives information about the spiritual level that the student has attained, and it also makes it easier to guide the person spiritually if he has followed a certain path in the past. A female student of mine laughed recently when I told her that she had followed The path of love in several past lives. She commented: "You have told me three times now that I have walked the path of love and silence, but with my head I still do not understand it." But this overall assessment of her spiritual growth uptil now, and of the spiritual paths that she had walked, made all the pieces of her life puzzle fit together - and brought a new, creative light to all her life choices in her current life. A male student of mine, who was a Tibetan monk in a previous life, walks The path of meditation, and I notice how I change my language and the methods that I recommend when I guide him along the path of meditation. I now work with students who walk both The path of love and The path of meditation, which also allows me to discover a deeper integration of love and meditation on my path to enlightenment.

What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say, It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced.

What are we all chasing? Nella wonders. To live, of course. To be unbound from the invisible ropes that Johannes spoke of in his study. Or to be happy in them, at least.

What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! Free! Body and soul free! She kept whispering.

What did you gain from marriage?” wondered Sean. “My false freedom!” “(Astonished) Why false freedom? (Apprehensively) Nobody shall touch my freedom!” “Nobody will touch it! It is not always how you think it is; that someone would nag at you or interfere in your life.. You will kill your freedom by your own hands, that partner will be your concern; what she is doing, what she is going to do, what she thinks, what and where and why. Even if you raised the flag of indifference, you will always have an unanswered question. Maybe for your dignity, love, pride, jealousy, or preference.. You may experience it someday!

What difference, being a pawn for the Light or a pawn for the Dark?" There was a short silence. "There is a great difference," said Cadvan softly. "One difference is that for the Dark, certainly you are a pawn. For the Light, you are a free human being, free to make mistakes, to do wrong, even. You are free to choose, whether or not you believe it." "Funny idea of freedom." "It is the difference between committment and slavery," Cadvan said. "Between working for what you hope for and believe in the depths of your heart, and what someone else forces you to do.

What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I now find I myself have left behind me, which have shown me some right, or wrong, way I have come. What one story may have pointed out to me is of no avail in the writing of another. But 'avail' is not what I want; freedom ahead is what each story promises - beginning anew. And all the while, as further hindsight has told me, certain patterns in my work repeat themselves without my realizing. There would be no way of knowing this, for during the writing of any single story, there is no other existing. Each writer must find out for himself, I imagine, on what basis he lives with his own stories.

What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?

What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.

What do we free spirits want? We just want to think our own thoughts and feel our own feelings. Why should that be a problem for anyone else?

What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural?

What drove us crazy wasn't necessarily the sexual freedom his critic claimed he was unleashing, but freedom, period. Freedom to be yourself, to express yourself, to wear what you wanted to wear, to look the way you wanted to look, to have your own style, your own talk.

Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us.

Whatever you choose to do with your time on earth, do it passionately, follow the voice of your soul and don't focus some much on being interested in life, but being the interesting one full of life.

What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his.

What good's a black face if it means I'm just someone else's property? Why give me these arms and legs just to carry someone else's load, not my own?

What freedom to be tied up, and still have the capability of ignoring ridiculous, silly conversations.

What happens if the cause dies? What happens if people die? Why would I subject myself to that? It’s just easier to not.” She said. “I suppose, but what’s the use of living in freedom if you can’t free others, too?” I asked her.

What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on.

What happens when I love, you ask, does the world start making sense? No, my dear, it does not. But it won’t matter to you then.

What have been called “women’s issues” are freedom issues. Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue. Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.

What if "redemption" means not only freeing yourself from what you've done, but also from what's been done to you?

What if butterflies just exist to bring color and joy to the world? What if their sole purpose in life is to freely flit around and remind us that we are born with the innate ability to not only survive, but to fly?” He was being profound and poetic, while she was being scientific. Mary grew silent and thought before she spoke. “Maybe so, but they don’t live forever.” “Neither do we or any other thing on the planet. It’s butterflies’ abilities to happily fly despite everything around them that makes them free.

What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process? Equality, then, would simply be a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems—since problems there will always be—a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse or fade away.

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?

What if you should forget yourself in the excitement and just peddle straight through the park and out the other end?’ she warns. ‘If you keep your feet on the pedals and don’t stop, where might you end up?’ The idea appeals to Maud more than she can say. She doesn’t want to know where she may ‘end up’.

What is freedom if not self-determination, the right to create one's own destiny?

What is an unconditional state?

What is freedom? It is the thinking of your own thoughts with no influence from outside. The making of your own decisions based upon your heart and soul and not based upon others.

What is important is not what freedom I personally would like to exercise but what freedom some person may need in order to do things beneficial to society. This freedom we can assure to the unknown person only by giving it to all.

[W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.