freedom Quotes

“When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.”

“Dobby is free.”

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

“The silver trump of freedom roused in my soul eternal wakefulness.”

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.”

“Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison When the door is so wide open?”

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

“Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was very present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”

“I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.”

But of course he is doing now of his own free will what we could not make him do before.

“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. “We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

To me, freedom entitles you to do something, not to not do something.

“Take special care that your thoughts remain unfettered. One may be a free man and yet be bound tighter than a slave.”

“I’ll fight when needed, revel when there’s occasion, mourn when there is grief, and die if my time comes … but I will not let anyone use me against my will.”

“He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.”

“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.

“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.”

“On the other side of your fear is freedom.”

“George said wonderingly, ‘S’pose they was a carnival or a circus come to town, or a ball game, . . . We’d just go to her . . . We wouldn’t ask nobody if we could. Jus’ say, ‘We’ll go to her,’ an’ we would. Jus’ milk the cow and sling some grain to the chickens an’ go to her.‘”

“All men are free and equal, in the grave.”

“It was on his grave, my friends, that I resolved, before God, that I would never own another slave, while it is possible to free him; that nobody, through me, should ever run the risk of being parted from home and friends, and dying on a lonely plantation, as he died. So, when you rejoice in your freedom, think that you owe it to that good old soul, and pay it back in kindness to his wife and children. Think of your freedom, every time you see uncle tom’s cabin; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be as honest and faithful and Christian as he was.”

“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

“Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.”

“I formd them free, and free they must remain.”

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you’re good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.

“You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage--well, baby you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the West by Tulip, Texas, or on the East by Somaliland--it’s wherever you go, because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

“Did she die free?” asked Jem. “As the mountain air,” said Atticus.

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

“It wasn’t northern agitators who pushed Negroes to question their country, as so many southern whites wanted to believe. It was their own pride, their patriotism, their deep and abiding belief in the possibility of democracy that inspired the Negro people. And why not? Who knew American democracy more intimately than the Negro people? They knew democracy’s every virtue, vice, and shortcoming, its voice and contour, by its profound and persistent absence in their lives. The failure to secure the blessings of democracy was the feature that most defined their existence in America. Every Sunday they made their way to their sanctuaries and fervently prayed to the Lord to send them a sign that democracy would come to them.”

“The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address.”

“Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way.” She touches my uninjured shoulder and smiles. “But our minds move in a dozen different directions. We can’t be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders. It means we can’t be controlled. And it means that no matter what they do, we will always cause trouble for them.”

I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

But only in their dreams can men be truly free.

“Securing freedom and property to all men, and above all things, the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”

“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

“No wife wanting new linoleum. No relatives pulling at him with watery old eyes. No one to care about, which is what makes him free enough to be a good con man.”

There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.

“When you go free, nothing makes you happier, and when you hurt someone you care about, nothing can hurt more.”

“A city which belongs to just one man is no true city.”

“The holes are all hidden and the Owsla have every rabbit in the place under orders. You can’t call your life your own: and in return you have safety—if it’s worth having at the price you pay.”

Where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.

“Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it.”

“I didn’t say yes. I can say no to anything I say vile, and I don’t have to count the cost. But because you said yes, all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that your can do is to have me killed.”

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.”

“It was a tiresome game, but I had to play it or feel a complete puppet.”

“Decisions were a delight after the curse. I loved having the power to say yes or no, and refusing anything was a special pleasure.”

“He who has conquered weakness, and has put away all selfish thoughts, belongs neither to oppressor nor oppressed. He is free.”

“But in bed, before I fell asleep, I’d imagine what I would do if I were free of Lucinda’s curse. At dinner I’d paint lines of gravy on my face and hurl meat pasties at Manners Mistress. I’d pile Headmistress’s best china on my head and walk with a wobble and a swagger till every piece was smashed. Then I’d collect the smashed pottery and the smashed meat pasties and grind them into all my perfect stitchery.”

“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in . . . terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

“I agree. Love shouldn’t be dictated.” “Nothing should be dictated!” An idiotic remark to a future king, but I was thinking of Lucinda.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”

“Her eyes lingered a moment on Selia, and she found herself thinking, She would be better at playing princess than I am. The thought stung. Ani wanted so badly to do it right, to be regal and clever and powerful. But too often her only truly happy moments were the bursts of freedom, stolen afternoons on her horse’s back, brief, breathtaking rides past the stables to where the gardens turned wild, her lungs stinging with the cold, her muscles trembling with the hard ride.”

“I gain my freedom on the day the moon loses her daughter, if that occurs in a week when two Mondays come together. I await it with patience.”

Raise a glass to freedom Something they can never take away No matter what they tell you

“After two years of being treated like mice, tonight we’re making a stand. Tonight we’re taking the fight back to the Creators, no matter what we have to go through to get there. Tonight the Grievers better be scared.”

“No,” Father let out his breath in a rush. “No. I’m sick of having to deal with thieves and pimps and pushers. I’m sick of having to scrape and bow to men who live off the misery of their brothers and sisters. […] Don’t you see? We’re all tainted by it. As long as we keep quiet and let it go on, we’re as bad as they are. It eats at them; it eats at us.”

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

“If she took Po as a husband, she would be making promises about a future she couldn’t yet see. For once she became his wife, she would be his wife forever. And no matter how much freedom Po gave her, she would always know it was a gift. Her freedom wouldn’t be her own; it would be Po’s to give or withhold. That he would never withhold it made no difference. If it did not come from her, it wasn’t hers.”

“Thought is free.”

“I heartily accept the motto, — ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.”

“The safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law and the surest pledge of freedom.”

“’Why is it,’ Jonathan puzzled, ‘that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?’”

“Educate, then, at any rate; for the age of implicit self-sacrifice and instinctive virtues is already flitting far away from us, and the time is fast approaching when freedom, public peace, and social order itself will not be able to exist without education.”

“It is possible to conceive men arrived at a degree of freedom which should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented.”

“‘The only true law is that which leads to freedom,’ Jonathan said. ‘There is no other.’”

“He spoke of very simple things–It is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition out limitation in any form.”

“In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.”

“Discipline brings freedom.”

“There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”

“Freedom engenders private animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference.”

“Freedom in the Gospel does not mean license. It means opportunity.”

″...for each of us who wants to live in happiness and give happiness, there’s another different sort of person wanting to take it away...”

“A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people”

“The Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel. As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew how each of them perished.”

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

“Be not anxious! Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of all anxiety.”

“Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government”

“I am astonished at finding your gates shut against me, and at not meeting with a better welcome. We Lacedaemonians thought of you as allies eager to have us, to whom we should come in spirit even before we were with you in body; and in this expectation undertook all the risks of a march of many days through a strange country, so far did our zeal carry us. It will be a terrible thing if after this you have other intentions, and mean to stand in the way of your own and Hellenic freedom.”

“…as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

“The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States”

″While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law….We can decide to step in front of a fast-moving train, but we cannot decide what will happen when the train hits us.″

“Loose these chains. Loose these chains.”

“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.”

“Walter’s sense of humor hadn’t failed him despite his six years on death row. And this case had given him lots of fodder. We would often talk about situations and people connected to the case that, for all the damage they had caused, had still made us laugh at their absurdity. But the laughter today felt very different. It was the laughter of liberation.”

“Ona might have married and left them, but she would not, for she loved Teta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America, where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part, and the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless – they would live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day; and Jurgis figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go to America and marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor, a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials – he might do as he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man.”

“Freedom begins way back. It begins not with doing what you want but with doing what you ought - that is, with discipline.”

“Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.”

“But here, in our tunnel, we feel it no longer. The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men. And these three hours give us strength for our hours above the ground.”

“Good children are defined as meek, considerate, unselfish and perfectly law-abiding. Such rules allow no place for vitality, spontaneity, inner freedom, inner independence and critical judgment. These rules cause parents, even well-intentioned ones, to abandon their children. Such abandonment creates the toxic shame I’ve been describing.

“Ah! Why couldn’t you say so before? Why he doesn’t make himself comfortable? Let’s try and get this clear. Has he not the right to? Certainly he has. It follows that he doesn’t want to. There’s reasoning for you.”

“But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.”

“Yea, I am free, strong in the strength of truth.”

“It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.”

“Freedom was the price of privacy.”

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

“Man is preoccupied with freedom yet laden with handicaps. The breadth of his activity and experience is narrowed by the limitations of his relatively weak, sluggish body.”

“Let it be thy earnest and incessant care as a Roman and a man to perform whatsoever it is that thou art about, with true and unfeigned gravity, natural affection, freedom and justice.”

“Commitment to the will of God - the purpose for which we are designed - offers freedom to become the person we are meant to be.”

“Freedom is a condition in which something can fulfill the purpose for which it is designed.”

“Freedom does not come by trying to produce it. Freedom in the spiritual realm comes by an absolute surrender to Jesus and living dependent upon Him.”

″…though I wouldn’t have admitted it, even to myself, I didn’t want God aboard. He was too heavy. I wanted Him approving from a considerable distance. I didn’t want to be thinking of Him. I wanted to be free—like Gypsy.”

“I wanted life itself, the color and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a loved poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn’t want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ.”

“Look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply?”

“Does freedom mean that you are allowed to do whatever you want to do? Or we could talk about all the limiting influences in your life that actively work against your freedom. Your family genetic heritage, your specific DNA, your metabolic uniqueness, the quantum stuff that is going on at a subatomic level where only I am the always-present observer.”

“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”

“I think people should be able to choose who they Match with,” I say lamely. “Where would it end, Cassia?” she says, her voice patient. “Would you say next that people should be able to choose how many children they have, and where they want to live? Or when they want to die?”

“You think there’s nothing here because we’re not putting up a fight. But there are words in our heads that no one else knows. And my grandfather died on his terms, not yours. We have things of value but you can never find them because you don’t even know how to look.”

“It is one thing to make a choice and it is another thing to never have the chance. What would it be like to know that you could never choose anything else?”

″ ‘You left because you are against our cause as freedom fighters. Right?’ (...) What cause? I thought. I used the only freedom that I had then, my thought. ”

“That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart. His passport shall be made And crowns for convoy put into his purse. We would not die in that man’s company That fears his fellowship to die with us.”

“Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.”

“For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.”

“Becoming free from the clutches of ignorance is not as simple as learning about its cause. Even if you are honest and truly believe in the philosophy of yoga and mystical spirituality, all of your mental efforts to negate the ignorance will fail in the beginning.”

“We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”

“I think about my childhood, the life I lived on Delano Island, that place was so small. Everyone knew me, not because I was special or anything just because everyone knew everyone, and the claustrophobia of that, I can’t tell you. I just wanted some privacy. For as long as I could remember I just wanted to get out, and then I got to Toronto and no one knew me. Toronto felt like freedom.”

“I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

“I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls.

“But what was the story? No one had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.”

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”

“For me, Cincinnati was the promised land. After a few days there, I lost that Little Rock feeling of being choked and kept in ‘my place’ by white people. I felt free, as though I could soar above the clouds.”

“Being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests.”

“I was both frightened and excited when the white neighbors who lived across the street invited me for dinner. It was the first time white people had ever wanted to eat with me or talk to me about ordinary things. Over the dinner table, I found out they were people just like me. They used the same blue linen dinner napkins that Grandma India favored. They treated me like an equal, like I belonged with them.”

“We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is - and the definition isn’t right. [...] It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.”

“I scotch to the edge of my seat and reach for my walker. By my estimation, I’m only eighteen feet from freedom. Well, there’s an entire city block to traverse after that, but if I hoof it I bet I can catch the last few acts. […] I may be in my nineties, but who says I’m helpless?”

“I thought about Hailsham closing, and how it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man’s fist. Once that happened, there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other any more.”

“Joana’s freedom had cost me mine.”

“All phenomena are [ultimately] selfless, empty, and free from conceptual elaboration.”

“May all sentient beings be endowed with happiness! May they all be separated from suffering and its causes! May they be endowed with joy, free from suffering! May they abide in equanimity, free from attachment or aversion!”

“Soul is as free as the clouds in the sky, but he is committed to his dream. On his freely chosen path, he often has to get up earlier than he would like, speak to people from whom he learns nothing, make certain sacrifices.”

“I thought of the countless refugees trekking toward freedom. How many millions of people had lost their home and family during the war?”

“If you don’t care about money, Nina dear, call it by its other names.” “Kruge? Scrub? Kaz’s one true love?” “Freedom, security, retribution.”

″ I know what it’s like to spend an entire lifetime trying to pretend that I’m okay, that I’m “fine.” I know what it’s like to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, convincing people that I have it all together. I know how exhausting it is and how many nights I cried alone in my bed, too tired to carry the burden anymore. What I do know is the freedom when I decided that I wasn’t going to pretend anymore.”

“To everyone else, school was prison. To Lena, it was freedom.”

“To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.”

″‘Why do you keep talking to my horse instead of to me?’ said the girl. ‘Excuse me, Tarkheena,’ said Bree (with just the slightest backward tilt of his ears), ‘but that’s Calormene talk. We’re free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you’re running away to Narnia, you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well say you’re her human.’ The girl opened her mouth to speak and then stopped. Obviously she had not quite seen it in that light before.”

″‘No one is free,’ said Daniel. ‘So long as the land is cursed by the Romans.‘”

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”

“On Mars there is never anything to laugh at. All the things that are funny to us humans either cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen—sweetheart, what you call ‘freedom’ doesn’t exist on Mars; everything is planned by the Old Ones.”

“When you lose your desire for things that do not matter, you will be free.”

“My story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.”

“We live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a great responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. The luxury of the blind. The luxury of not knowing what I know: That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and uncomprehensible to you, saves lives. You can’t handle it. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about, you want me on that wall. You need me there. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as a backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I’d prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I’d suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post.”

“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails...”

“A person must start with a willingness to learn and follow it with long, hard study. I grok that is salutary.”

“We don’t have to look like everyone else, Tally, and act like everyone else. We’ve got a choice. We can grow up any way we want.”

“Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of ‘altruism’ is the worst. People do what they want to, every time.”

“Freedom or death lay at this table. Her past and future were seated on a glass throne.”

I live for the dream that my children will be born free. That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them.

“‘No matter what happens,’ she said quietly, ‘I want to thank you.’ Chaol tilted his head to the side. ‘For what?’ Her eyes stung, but she blamed it on the fierce wind and blinked away the dampness. ‘For making my freedom mean something.’”

“The dictator, or consul, had a right to command the service of the Roman youth; and to punish an obstinate or cowardly disobedience by the most severe and ignominious penalties, by striking the offender out of the list of citizens, by confiscating his property, and by selling his person into slavery. The most sacred rights of freedom, confirmed by the Porcian and Sempronian laws, were suspended by the military engagement.”

Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it.

“In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest as well as duty to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.”

“howard: What’re yuh skeered of? You was a worm once! melinda: (Shocked) I wasn’t neither. howard: You was so! When the whole world was covered with water, there was nothin’ but worms and blobs of jelly. And you and your whole family was worms!”

“We have some say over the size of our own lives—we have the agency and authority and freedom to make them smaller or larger, heavier or lighter”

“You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think—so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies too!”

“The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.”

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”

“The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.”

“If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system.That’s much more powerful than rebelling outside the system.”

“Lincoln was not great because he was born in a log cabin, but because he got out of it.”

“Most people would rather live in the predictability of captivity than risk the uncertainty that comes in a fight for freedom.”

“If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged.”

“If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.”

“If an entire nation could see its freedom, why not a girl?”

“He freed me from the stocks. He is my friend. My only friend.”

“Our Creed does not command us to be free. It commands us to be wise.”

“It is not our right to punish one for thinking as he does, no matter how much we disagree.”

“We didn’t really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to.”

“How good it feels to walk without a veil on my head.”

“As for Houshang, Zozo’s husband, he was a CEO in Iran, but in Austria, he was nothing.”

“A part of me understood (my old friends). When something is forbidden, it takes on a disproportionate importance.”

“Since we weren’t married, we couldn’t kiss each other in public, or even give one another a friendly hug to express our extreme joy. We risked imprisonment and being whipped.”

“The political prisoners were liberated a few days later. There were 3000 of them.”

“Silence hangs over us, but ... a different kind of silence, one that lets me breathe. ”

“That’s a hibiscus, isn’t it, Aunty? ”

“Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.”

“They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”

“Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear.”

“We cannot be free until they are free.”

“One can give freedom only by setting someone free. ”

“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”

“The freedom then of man, and liberty of acting according to his own will, is grounded on his having reason, which is able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will.”

“Freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.”

″‘Come,’ I said, with decision, ‘we will go back; your health is precious.‘”

“For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.”

“It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend.”

“His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.”

“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

“That girl didn’t want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.”

“She liked the enormous sky and the winds, and the land that you couldn’t see to the end of. Everything was so free and big and splendid.”

“She came from a background where nothing was ever good enough. And that was something that weighed heavy on her. But in our house together, it was a sense of just trying stuff and allowing each other to fail and to be excited about things. That was liberating for her. It was exciting to see her grow and both of us grow and change together. But that’s also the hard part: growing without growing apart or changing without it scaring the other person. I still find myself having conversations with her in my mind. Rehashing old arguments and defending myself against something she said about me.”

“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”

“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights [and duties] of humanity.”

“Into the cage they put a young panther […] he did not even seem to miss his freedom; this noble body, equipped just short of bursting with everything it needed, seemed to carry its freedom around with it.”

“I felt free and therefore I was free.”

“You are only as free as you think you are and freedom will always be as real as you believe it to be.”

“The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”

“Discipline equals freedom”

“Our freedom to operate and maneuver had increased substantially through disciplined procedures.”

“He can be the husband and father Hoyt’s dirty work has never permitted him to be. He can be a whole new man. He can be free.”

“As free as it wanted to be—that’s how free the free will of Boaz was.”

“When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”

“The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

“Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”

“If I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”

“If the essence of freedom were merely the act of choice, then the mere fact of making choices would perfect our freedom.”

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

“If I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”

“If I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”

“But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy.”

“Fife…suddenly realized that he was free. He did not have to stay here any more. He was released. He could simply get up and walk away—provided he was able—with honor, without anyone being able to say he was a coward or courtmartialing him or putting him to jail. His relief was so great he suddenly felt joyous despite the wound.”

“Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”

“Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free. ”

“If I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”

“If I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”

“Then, feeling the coldness of the steel against his fingertips, he pulls the fire alarm.”

“Our individuality is all, all, that we have.”

“Connor had risked his life to save Lev, just as Connor had done for the baby on the doorstep. Well, the baby had been saved, but Lev had not, and although he knows he can’t be held responsible for Lev’s unwinding, he feels as if it is his fault.”

“You have never tasted freedom, friend,” Dienekes spoke, “or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.”

“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.”

“People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer anymore.”

“The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”

“In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.”

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces.”

“The basic premise of the democratic sort of regime is freedom.”

″... the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. ”

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.”

“My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. And my son will make numbers, and these things will make us free because he will know—he will know and through him we will know.”

“We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. ”

“I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and danger.”

“The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”

“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.”

“Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.”

“The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”

“The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and (...) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty.”

A bunch of teens running away to succeed freedom but also causing an uproar that will aim to take down the government.

“If anybody could survive on the loose, it would be this kid who showed up from Hollidaysburg. Who slept on floors. Who outran dogs.”