c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Someday, the realm of liberty and justice will encompass the planet. Freedom is not just the birthright of the few, it is the God-given right of all His children, in every country. It won't come by conquest. It will come, because freedom is right and freedom works. It will come, because cooperation and good will among free people will carry the day.
— Ronald Reagan, The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
— Adlai E. Stevenson II
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
— Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions
I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.
— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
How can a bird that is born for joySit in a cage and sing?
— William Blake
Government leaders are amazing. So often it seems they are the last to know what the people want.
— Aung San Suu Kyi
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality
—  those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White
If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.
— Terry Goodkind, The Pillars of Creation
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor
The free man never thinks of escape.
— Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
I love my country, not my government.
— Jesse Ventura
The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.
— Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now
Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiograpy of Nelson Mandela with Connections
The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.
— Wendell Berry
Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.
— Danielle Bernock, Emerging with Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, and the Love That Heals
He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.... We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different world, and then we'll build... The Republic of Heaven.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals
All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.
— Voltaire, Candide
So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
— Franz Kafka, Amerika
Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.
— Faye Wattleton
Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.
— Friedrich A. Hayek
... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Freedom is just chaos with better lighting
— Alan Dean Foster, To the Vanishing Point
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
United States: the country where liberty is a statue.
— Nicanor Parra, Artefactos
Look," Peter said.To the north was a series of vast grassy plains, and there, just looking like specks at first, was a herd of horses, a species that in Neverland had never been tamed. They were beautiful, flashes of brown and black and tan, their coats gleaming. There was no reason for them to be running that Tiger Lily could see. It was likely that they just loved to run."That's what I want my life to be," Peter said, staring down at the horses.Tiger Lily sank against him and watched the herd, and thought that was what she wanted too.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
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.
— Kahlil Gibran
She is a rare soul, she has this infectious energy that makes you want to run next to her, she belonged to no one but herself & to anyone that was yet understand themselves, found the missing pieces in her presence.
— Nikki Rowe
Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
— Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes
It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des AndersdenkendenFreedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.
— Rosa Luxemburg
The world is not ready for some people when they show up, but that shouldn't stop anyone.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature. To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.
— Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season
For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live
—  no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to.
Our liberty will not be secured at the sword's point... We must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And when the people reaches that height, God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards, and liberty will shine out like the first dawn.
— José Rizal
I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and...Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.
— Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.
— Ayn Rand, Anthem
These are the things before me. And as I stand here at the door of glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man’s freedom. 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. This and nothing else.
— Ayn Rand, Anthem
The history of free men is never written by chance but by choice - their choice.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
I am an artist, my hair is rarely tamed & sometimes I sleep till noon, My house is messy and I speak to the moon. I care less about the materials that I share with my world and more about the passion inside myself. Im an artist, what more can you expect? i am full of soul, love and all the rest.
— Nikki Rowe
I believe in only one thing: liberty
—  but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
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
— Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
— Octavia E. Butler
I Became a free woman when I decided to stop dreaming, freedom that is waiting for nothing .. and anticipation is a state of slavery" - Ahlam (Chaos of the Senses)
— Ahlam Mosteghanemi, فوضى الحواس
There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.
— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
— Isaiah Berlin
Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.
— Slavoj Žižek, Against Human Rights
How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!
— Thomas Jefferson
In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.
— Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto
We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
— Daniel M. Gilbert
I cannot afford to lose you, too""You cannot lose something you do not own. Take me with you
— Kiersten White, And I Darken
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
— Niall Ferguson
The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The American people are free to do exactly what they are told.
— Ward Churchill
Your idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing. The more amazing, the more people will click with your idea. The more people click with your idea, the more it will change the world.
— Hugh MacLeod
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
The answer to 1984 is 1776
— Alex E. Jones
Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
— E.B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan
Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin
Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
I'm not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers. I'm scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be "authority", and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders. I don't care if there's one looney with a stupid moustache. He's not a threat if the people do not believe in "authority".
— Larken Rose
The things I carry are my thoughts. That's it. They are the only weight. My thoughts determine whether I am free and light or burdened.
— Kamal Ravikant, Live Your Truth
William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir."Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.
— Terry Pratchett, The Truth
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. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. 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.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.
— George MacDonald, Lilith
The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
— Winston S. Churchill
I'd rather be miserable and free than happy and caged.
— Dia Reeves
That's all the freedom we can hope for - the freedom to choose our prison.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Peace means nothing without freedom.
— Derek Landy, Kingdom of the Wicked
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance. 
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If there's one observation that rings true in today's changing world, it is that freedom and peace go hand in hand.
— Ronald Reagan, The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom
As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.
— Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
Those rabbits stopped fighting the system, because it was easier to take the loss of freedom, to forget what it was like before the fence kept them in, than to be out there in the world struggling to find shelter and food. They had decided that the loss of some was worth the temporary comfort of many.
— Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds
Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
You can't pick and choose which types of freedom you want to defend. You must defend all of it or be against all of it.
— Scott Howard Phillips
I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all mean are created free and equal.
— Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
freedom is nothing but the distancebetween the hunter and the hunted
— Bei Dao, The August Sleepwalker
But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who's stopping us from inventing one?
— Lewis Carroll
The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.
— Erich Fromm
Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You have to remember, rights don't come in groups we shouldn't have 'gay rights'; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn't have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.
— Ron Paul
It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.
— Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things
The only freedom you truly have is in your mind, so use it.
— M.T. Dismuke
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
— Ronald Reagan
Democracy is the best revenge.
— Benazir Bhutto
No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.
— Luis Valdez
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.
— Plato
Your answer is the logical, coherent answer an absolutely normal person would give: It's a tie! A lunatic, however, would say that what I have around my neck is a ridiculous, useless bit of colored cloth tied in a very complicated way, which makes it harder to get air into your lungs and difficult to turn your neck. I have to be careful when I'm anywhere near a fan, or I could be strangled by this bit of cloth.If a lunatic were to ask me what this tie is for, I would have to say, absolutely nothing. It's not even purely decorative, since nowadays it's become a symbol of slavery, power, aloofness. The only really useful function a tie serves is the sense of relief when you get home and take it off; you feel as if you've freed yourself from something, though quite what you don't know.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
The freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.
— Mercedes Lackey, Sacred Ground
America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
— John Quincy Adams
Freedom is sloppy. But since tyranny's the only guaranteed byproduct of those who insist on a perfect world, freedom will have to do.
— Bill Willingham, Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland
After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?
— Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
The rain that falls wherever it pleases. I want to be that rain.
— Marty Rubin
Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon - everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew that their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without fox would laugh at them. And these "men" who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Glass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother - a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, THAT was freedom.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever "government" things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in "live and let live," and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to "live and let live" are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist.
— Larken Rose
But who would build the roads if there were no government? You mean to tell me that 300 million people in this country and 7 billion people on the planet would just sit around in their houses and think “Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can't because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here then we could do it. If they were here to boss us around and steal our money and really inefficiently build the flat places, then we would be set. Then I would be comfortable and confident that I could get places. But I can’t go to Fred’s house or the market because we can’t possibly build a flat space from A to B. We can make these really small devices that enable us to contact people from all over the word that fits in our pockets; we can make machines that we drive around in, but no, we can’t possibly build a flat space.
— Larken Rose
To know how to free oneself is nothing
—  the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom
While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it.While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
— Eugene V. Debs
To free a man from error is not to deprive him of anything but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbours it. Therefore deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
For so I created them free and free they must remain.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
Like a butterfly stuck in a chrysalis, waiting for the perfect moment, I was waiting for the day I could burst forth and fly away and find my home.
— Emme Rollins, Dear Rockstar
The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount…If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.
— Harry Truman
Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.
— Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.
— Aristotle
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.Freedom
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
— Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan, 1961-1982
Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.
— Lucille Ball
If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom." -Judy Deck in an e-mail sent to Chris Rose
— Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic: Post-Katrina Stories
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and excepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it's good and it has passion.
— Kurt Cobain
All I wanted was for you to be free from everything. And with that freedom, you often showed me another world, so I wanted you to be even freer. I wanted you to be so free that you would live your life for other people.
— Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
Give me freedom to think and I'll give you my life.
— Válgame, Zori 1ª Parte
...the consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.Steal a fish from one guy and give it to another--and keep doing that on a daily basis--and you'll make the first guy pissed off, but you'll make the second guy lazy and dependent on you. Then you can tell the second guy that the first guy is greedy for wanting to keep the fish he caught. Then the second guy will cheer for you to steal more fish. Then you can prohibit anyone from fishing without getting permission from you. Then you can expand the racket, stealing fish from more people and buying the loyalty of others. Then you can get the recipients of the stolen fish to act as your hired thugs. Then you can ... well, you know the rest.
— Larken Rose
You Will Never Live A Perfect Life - Getting In A Relationship Is Like Diving In A Sea, You Can Drown And Whales And Sharks Can Kill You. On The Other Hand, Being Single Is Like Staying Away From That Water, You Will Starve.
— Cyc Jouzy
We nurture our creativity when we release our inner child. Let it run and roam free. It will take you on a brighter journey.
— Serina Hartwell
Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.
— Frederick Douglass
Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
— Abraham Lincoln
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create
The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.
— Albert Einstein
I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short...I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away.
— Sophie Hannah, The Wrong Mother
Give me liberty or give me d
— Patrick Henry
It's our goddamed city! It's our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!
— Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one's back they are a heavy weight.
— Marina Tsvetaeva, Сводные тетради
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understan
— Louis D. Brandeis
That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do.
— Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad
The world isn't scandalized by our freedom but by our fakeness.
— Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything
The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.
— Charles Moore
When you aren't satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn't need to complain.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.)
— Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
When Muslim radicals and fundamentalists look at the West, they see only the openness that makes us, in their eyes, decadent and promiscuous. They see only the openness that has produced Britney Spears and Janet Jackson. They do not see, and do not want to see, the openness - the freedom of thought and inquiry - that has made us powerful, the openness that has produced Bill Gates and Sally Ride. They deliberately define it all as decadence. Because if openness, women's empowerment, and freedom of thought and inquiry are the real sources of the West's economic strength, then the Arab-Muslim world would have to change. And the fundamentalists and extremists do not want to change.
— Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Money comes with a price, and for me, the price is both freedom and a real life.
— Savi Sharma, Everyone Has A Story
Deep pockets and empty hearts rule the world. We unleash them at our peril.
— Stefan Molyneux
If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Thought is free.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
It really is something ... that men disapprove even of our doing things that are patently good. Wouldn't it be possible for us just to banish these men from our lives, and escape their carping and jeering once and for all? Couldn't we live without them? Couldn't we earn our living and manage our affairs without help from them? Come on, let's wake up, and claim back our freedom, and the honour and dignity that they have usurped from us for so long. Do you think that if we really put our minds to it, we would be lacking the courage to defend ourselves, the strength to fend for ourselves, or the talents to earn our own living? Let's take our courage into our hands and do it, and then we can leave it up to them to mend their ways as much as they can: we shan't really care what the outcome is, just as long as we are no longer subjugated to them.
— Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men
He's in pain. I am, too. It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain we feel.
— Ally Condie, Matched
Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.
— Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea
Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Forgiveness is the one gift you don't give to others. Rather, it is the gift you give yourself, so you can finally be free.
— Shannon L. Alder
I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.
— Milton Friedman
There is but one task for all --One life for each to give.What stands if Freedom 
— Rudyard Kipling, Complete Verse
You are really and truly and completely free. There is no kicker. There is no if, and, or but. You are free. You can do it right or wrong. You can obey or disobey. You can run from Christ or run to Christ. You can choose to become a faithful Christian or an unfaithful Christian. You can cry, cuss, and spit, or laugh, sing, and dance. You can read a novel or the Bible. You can watch television or pray. You're free...really free.
— Steve   Brown, A Scandalous Freedom
They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor S
— Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin
[I]n the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.
— Elizabeth I, Collected Works
Goddamn, sometimes it hurt to be free.
— Kristin Hannah, If You Believe
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.
— Rachel Ward, Numbers
The miracle of life is given by One greater than ourselves, but once given, each life is ours to nurture and preserve, to foster, not only for today's world but for a better one to come. There is no purpose more noble than for us to sustain and celebrate life in a turbulent world, and that is what we must do now. We have no higher duty, no greater cause as humans. Life and the preservation of freedom to live it in dignity is what we are on this Earth to do. Everything we work to achieve must seek that end so that some day our prime ministers, our premiers, our presidents, and our general secretaries will talk not of war and peace, but only of peace.
— Ronald Reagan, The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom
There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.
— Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters
We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. (pg. 323, The Pleasures of Eating)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
To find your true identity within the will of Tze Yo Tzuh...that is the highest of all freedoms.
— Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese
Leaving what is safe so you can be more, Derek said. The cage is what the bird knows; the sky is all the things he still wants to do even if it's a risk.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Rises
(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute
— Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix
There is so much freedom in not having to choose.
— Megan Hart
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
— Alexander Hamilton
When you truly sing, you sing yourself free. When you truly dance, you dance yourself free. When you walk in the mountains or swim in the sea, again, you set yourself free.
— Jay Woodman
Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.
— Thomas Jefferson
It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
Freedom is not a license to act but a license to exercise free choices in any given situation.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
It was great. Freedom even the imagined kind always is.
— Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind. America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who -- with their hands, their intelligence and their heart -- built the greatest nation in the world: ‘Come, and everything will be given to you.’ She said: ‘Come, and the only limits to what you'll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent.
— Nicolas Sarkozy
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
— Joyce Carol Oates
...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.
— Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto
No one could ever truly be free as long as they loved, and life wasn't worth living without love. So freedom? Overrated.
— Gena Showalter, Unraveled
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.'I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason
Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it?Toby: God bless America.
— Aaron Sorkin
Charity is today a 'political charity.'. . . it means the transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others. This transformation ought to be directed toward a radical change in the foundation of society, that is, the private ownership of the means of production.
— Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation
If this is vise I want no virtue....I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars....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.
— Ayn Rand
If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.(pg.89, "Think Little")
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Today I will masterbate!Okay, that was a mistake. I should have written "Today I will masterbate--if I want to!
— Al Franken
When will it begin, anyway?" Sirus held his gaze for a moment, his eyes full of concern- a concern that Joss didn't understand. "Probably sooner than you're ready for." "When's that?" "Well." Sirus sighed, as if doing the math in his head."It'll take us about three minutes to gather this stuff and get to the cabin, and another two or three for Abraham to realize you're here. So I'd say you have about seven more minutes of freedom left.
— Heather Brewer, First Kill