c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Encouraged by her parents’ applause, the girl went on: “Do you think we take off our tops to give you pleasure? We do it for ourselves, because we like it, because it feels better, because it brings our bodies nearer to the sun! You’re only capable of seeing us as sex objects!”Again Papa and Mama Clevis applauded, but this time their bravos had a somewhat different tone. Their daughter’s words were indeed right, but also somewhat inappropriate for a fourteen-year-old. It was like an eight-year-old boy saying: “If there’s a holdup, Mama, I’ll defend you.” Then too the parents applaud, because their son’s statement is clearly praiseworthy. But since it also shows excessive self-assurance, the praise is rightly shaded by a certain smile. With such a smile the Clevis parents had tinged their second bravos, and their daughter, who had heard that smile in their voices and did not approve of it, repeated with irritated obstinacy: “That’s over and done with. I’m not anybody’s sex object.”Without smiling, the parents merely nodded, not wanting to incite their daughter any further.Jan, however, could not resist saying:“My dear girl, if you only knew how easy it is not to be a sex object.”He uttered these words softly, but with such sincere sorrow that they resounded in the room for a long while. They were words difficult to pass over in silence, but it was not possible to respond to them either. They did not deserve approval, not being progressive, but neither did they deserve argument, because they were not obviously against progress. There were the worst words possible, because they were situated outside the debate conducted by the spirit of the time. They were words beyond good and evil, perfectly incongruous words.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Living independent might come as appalling as the word to anyone but me. The one who thinks it's a cool idea and worth it, has sure forgotten that independence comes with a price. If one doesn't still agree, you gotta try staying at a hostel.
— Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade
Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
Money does not buy you freedom. Time does.
— J.R. Rim
Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human...
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
We take a word, such as freedom, and dress it up to mean the ability to bear firearms, display flags, collect rainwater or grow clean food, but absolute freedom is not a relative construct. It is not there one minute or outlawed the next. It can never be seized or given. It is ever-lasting and omnipresent.
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations
I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
All religious and spiritual practices lead to one deep realisation: We Are One. All is One.
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
Now, in this generation, the entirety of the globe is facing an ideological and socio-political collapse on a grand scale. This is by design, it is man-made. The outcome is still carefully assessed with little room for error or improvement. There is only one flaw: the divine element in humanity. Our sentient consciousness bestows with the capacity to support the freedom of thought and movement with the inherent awareness that both come at a cost. When we speak our minds, we are going to offend and be offended. There are no safe spaces in conversation. People will say things we don't like. We have to accept this is the price of freedom of speech. When we allow for freedom of movement during times of war, we have to accept that we are inviting in enemies as well as refugees, especially when we don't bother to discern which is which. Even the best, most selfless intentions can pave the way to our downfall...
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
A heroic act is not always followed by glory and parades and forever freedom,” she said. “It’s often small, disregarded, or forgotten. But it matters.
— Shannon A. Thompson, July Lightning
Freedom runs faster than a Samoan cop that’s been paid to run. Freedom always run faster.
— Ta'afuli Andrew Fiu, Purple Heart
Freedom. He offered it like someone who didn't know what it meant, someone who had never had it taken away."pg 185
— Veronica Roth, Carve the Mark
It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness.
— Carlos Castañeda, Power of Silence
The birthplace of anarchy is the cemetery of freedom.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did.
— Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
I had chosen freedom, with all its insecurities, and nothing in the world would make me turn away from it.
— Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes
Trams are not free; their paths are predetermined; they must travel on the pre-designed paths! You are not a tram; your path is not predetermined; you can travel on any path! Fate is nonsense; you are free, you choose your own path with your own mind!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Every tiny molecule of Ash is in motion with my heat I am such a Lunatic that I am free even in Jail.
— Bhagat Singh
This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psicomagia
The Universe cares more about your empowerment and freedom from fear than it does just about anything. It's really true
— Renae A. Sauter, An Empowered Life: Mind/Body/Spirit Empowerment
Kiana loved birds," Breena told him late one dusky evening. "When she was just a few summers old, she would run beneath them as they flew, her chubby arms stretched out as if tmo take flight alongside them." She sniffed and wrapped her arms around her stomach. "A few weeks before the attack, she told me that she was still going to fly one day. 'I look at the birds, and I see freedom,' she said. 'To soar above the hurt of the world, to be too high for the wars of men to touch you: that is what it means to fly.
— Elizabeth    Wilson, House of the Dead
He has a way of drawing His loves back to Himself. A psyche separated from the peace (and the freedom) of Christ is liable to entangle itself in all sorts of folly and vanity, or confused witchcraft. On the one side it will preach, 'Empowerment!' But on the other it will scream, 'Oppression!' Yes, you now have the power to be oppressed: because as long as you look to be a victim, you will find yourself to be a victim.
— Criss Jami
To be respected is not my concern. So long as I seek to live in obedience to my Lord, respect will come accordingly from the people He deems it necessary.
— Criss Jami
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.
— C.S. Lewis
Because of the Dharma, my mind was more free in prison than worldly people experience in the best of circumstances.
— Yangthang Rinpoche
Don’t let anybody to ruin your inner joy or to interfere in your marvellous rhythm!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Freedom costs too much
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
If you wait until you find something to speak up for, something that you’re passionate about that concerns you and attacks your own beliefs, then eventually, when the day finally arrives, you might also find that you have forgotten how to speak.
— Kamand Kojouri
If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
— Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Volume 9: 1 September 1815 to 30 April 1816
What happens when I love, you ask, does the world start making sense? No, my dear, it does not. But it won’t matter to you then.
— Kamand Kojouri
Rights’ are ‘privileges,’ and if I am arrogant enough to demand the former without respecting the latter I will lose both.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law.
— H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia
I'm me," she whispered. "Me"Nel didn't know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant."I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me."Every time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear. Back in bed with her discovery, she stared out the window at the dark leaves of the horse chestnut."Me," she murmured. And then, sinking deeper into the quilts, "I want... I want to be... wonderful. Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful.
— Toni Morrison, Sula
A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.
— Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love
You let go. It's as simple and as complicated as Antonia had told me. You cry. You come. You sing. You laugh. You scream. You let go. No one needs to hang on to a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses. I looked back up at the sky, blinking at the lustrous beauty of the ascending and departing demons. They formed an alphabet I was beginning to learn to read. They were fire in the sky.
— Graham Joyce, How to Make Friends with Demons
The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.
— Michael Oakeshott
Comfort is the enemy of Liberty
— Samuel R. Young Jr.
I didn’t know I was in a prison until I was told I could go no further than where I am. It was in that moment that I determined to free myself. I am becoming much greater than I am today. I need the belief to grow.
— LaShawnda Jones
I don't think I'm entirely on board with the 'do what you truly want to do' school of thought. Not without a little more nuance. There has to be an anchor in the wide-open space. Otherwise, 'doing what you truly want' isn't an authentic attempt at exploration -- it's just another hyper-individualistic credo masquerading as something grand. I mean we're all gung ho about pursuing personal freedom, but why do we want it? If we never constructively apply it to something beyond ourselves, and if it doesn't deepen our sense of connection and humanity, then what's the point?
— Clara Bensen, No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering
The forces of freedom and choice will always triumph against the forces of conformity and control.
— Jeffrey Fry
There were no parents holding them back, no younger siblings needing to be cared for, no one telling them they were going to burn in hell, and no one telling them they had an illness. There were no limits, no responsibilities, no religion, and no misunderstandings. In that moment, there was just the music vibrating through their bodies. The worst part was knowing the music and the moment would eventually end.
— Chris Colfer, Stranger Than Fanfiction
You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.
— Benazir Bhutto, Daughter Of Destiny: An Autobiography
Free elections don't always result in fair elections.
— DaShanne Stokes
We are out and we are alive, and everyone in the universe is out here right now.
— Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
The smell of baking bread wafts up to my cell and reminds me of the days I walked freely in the cafes. This tears me apart more than my fear of death or the solitude in which I now find myself.
— Paulo Coelho, The Spy
But no matter what happens, I spoke up, made a voice for myself, freed from the haunting memories that have owned me for the last six years. I found my courage.
— Jessica Sorensen, The Redemption of Callie & Kayden
Freedom may never be conceived merely negatively, as the absence of compulsion. Freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual. No one is free until we are all free.
— Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God & Modernity
There is a word we should be using towards government officials whenever they deny our individual rights: "No". Being just a word, it isn't a strong weapon. But it is the intellectual wellspring from which all other weapons flow.
— Mike Klepper
Social pressure is the fascism of the democracies. Fascism is the democracy of the ruthless. Social engineering is the opiate of romantic intellectuals.
— Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World
You're a free man, act like it.
— Mike Klepper
It is not the chains of some tyrant that robs us of freedom. Rather, it is the staleness of our attitude.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
You've been taught to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's". Unlearn that lesson. Free men would not permit Caesar to exist.
— Mike Klepper
When an animal is looking for something that increases its chances of survival and reproduction (e.g. food, partners or social status), the brain produces sensations of alertness and excitement, which drive the animal to make even greater efforts because they are so very agreeable. In a famous experiment scientists connected electrodes to the brains of several rats, enabling the animals to create sensations of excitement simply by pressing a pedal. When the rats were given a choice between tasty food and pressing the pedal, they preferred the pedal (much like kids preferring to play video games rather than come down to dinner). The rats pressed the pedal again and again, until they collapsed from hunger and exhaustion
— Yuval Noah Harari
I walked home with a lighter step, for that night had knocked something loose in me, something long overdue to be knocked. At long last, I saw that group for what they were, with a few exceptions - a queer assortment of layabouts and late risers, most overdrawn at the bank or at least cutting into principal, only interested in who's going in the drawer at the Maidstone Club or their wedge on the fifteenth hole at Pebble Beach or dressing down the staff about a bit of shell in the lobster while shoveling canapés in. Jinx had done me a favor, freed me of any lingering allegiances to New York Society, snipped my fear of being on their bad side.
— Martha Hall Kelly, Lilac Girls
I think I know the delights of freedom
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
That would make it easy for Amara. Not having a choice was always easy. It was always safer. However bad things were, you kept your head down and did as you were told in order to avoid worse.The world always wanted people like her to believe those lies.You were never safe as long as you were at someone else’s whim.Amara’s eyes met Cilla’s, dark and beaten and haunted.Not having a choice was the worst thing in the world.Amara pushed the knife down. Nolan didn’t stop her. And in that moment, with her enemy’s knife in her own hand, a point pressing on Cilla’s arm, Cilla’s skin familiar against hers, relief sneaked up on her and refused to let go. Because what she’d told Cilla wasn’t true. It wasn’t that she couldn’t go back to her old life; she could. If she went back, she’d hate herself, but it meant survival. It might be worth it or it might not be, and she’d never have to find out because it would never happen. She wasn’t going back.It wasn’t because of what Maart wanted, or because of what Cilla asked, or because of what Jorn said. She’d made the choice. It was hers alone. This or nothing.Blood welled up from Cilla’s arm. Amara let the knife clatter to the ground. She reached for the cut. She was almost smiling now, a desperate smile that had her lips trembling, that came with tears burning her eyes.This or nothing.
— Corinne Duyvis, Otherbound
History has been stolen from us and replaced with guilt inducing lies.
— Stefan Molyneux
When the sky is fully covered by the birds, you will feel the winds of pure freedom beneath this sky!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
You are rich. You own. We are poor. We lack. You have. We do not have. Everything is beautiful here, only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces. The men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels. There you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit, because our men and women are free possessing nothing. They are free. And you, the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail, each alone, solitary with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes, the wall, the wall.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
It's a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I'll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do! Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can't give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!"... "Now, John, I don't know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
No freedom till we're equal. Damn right I support it.
— Macklemore, Macklemore- Same Love
True freedom is in striving through adversities to accomplish all noble things that need to be done so that we may be free from any blame in the end!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
An institution rooted in slavery can never set us free.
— DaShanne Stokes
The Native Americans, whose wisdom Thoreau admired, regarded the Earth itself as a sacred source of energy. To stretch out on it brought repose, to sit on the ground ensured greater wisdom in councils, to walk in contact with its gravity gave strength and endurance. The Earth was an inexhaustible well of strength: because it was the original Mother, the feeder, but also because it enclosed in its bosom all the dead ancestors. It was the element in which transmission took place. Thus, instead of stretching their hands skyward to implore the mercy of celestial divinities, American Indians preferred to walk barefoot on the Earth: The Lakota was a true Naturist – a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest on the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. Walking, by virtue of having the earth’s support, feeling its gravity, resting on it with every step, is very like a continuous breathing in of energy. But the earth’s force is not transmitted only in the manner of a radiation climbing through the legs. It is also through the coincidence of circulations: walking is movement, the heart beats more strongly, with a more ample beat, the blood circulates faster and more powerfully than when the body is at rest. And the earth’s rhythms draw that along, they echo and respond to each other. A last source of energy, after the heart and the Earth, is landscapes. They summon the walker and make him at home: the hills, the colours, the trees all confirm it. The charm of a twisting path among hills, the beauty of vine fields in autumn, like purple and gold scarves, the silvery glitter of olive leaves against a defining summer sky, the immensity of perfectly sliced glaciers … all these things support, transport and nourish us.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints…
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds. There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy. Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn’t break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world’s presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
An author who composes while walking, on the other hand, is free from such bonds; his thought is not the slave of other volumes, not swollen with verifications, nor weighted with the thought of others. It contains no explanation owed to anyone: just thought, judgement, decision. It is thought born of a movement, an impulse. In it we can feel the body’s elasticity, the rhythm of a dance. It retains and expresses the energy, the springiness of the body. Here is thought about the thing itself, without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition. The result will not be long and meticulous exegesis, but thoughts that are light and profound. That is really the challenge: the lighter a thought, the more it rises, and becomes profound by rising – vertiginously – above the thick marshes of conviction, opinion, established thought. While books conceived in the library are on the contrary superficial and heavy. They remain on the level of recopying.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
the joy of walking and feeling the body advancing ‘like a man alone’; the fullness of feeling alive. And then happiness, before the spectacle of a violet-shadowed valley below the beams of the setting sun, that miracle of summer evenings, when for a few minutes every shade of colour, flattened all day by a steely sun, is brought out at last by the golden light, and breathes. Happiness can come later, at the guesthouse, in the company of others staying there: people met there, happy to find themselves together for a moment through chance. But all of that involves receiving.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched. When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Those who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
— Freidrich Hayek
If this is the freedom you speak of... I want no part of it.
— K. Weikel, Building Monsters
When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the world’s door, there is nothing left to hold you: pavements no longer guide your steps (the path, a hundred thousand times repeated, of the return to the fold). Crossroads shimmer like hesitant stars, you rediscover the tremulous fear of choosing, a vertiginous freedom.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
But just a vibration among the trees and stones, on the paths. Walking to breathe in the landscape. Every step an inspiration born to die immediately, well beyond the oeuvre. I like to walk at my ease, and to stop when I like. A wandering life is what I want. To walk through a beautiful country in fine weather, without being obliged to hurry, and with a pleasant prospect at the end, is of all kinds of life the one most suited to my taste.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
The freedom is a tear digging into the flesh. (Doina Ruști -Manuscrisul fanariot)
— Doina Rusti
But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Thoreau: ‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in what is called – laughably no doubt – the ‘news’, one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains eternally new. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What’s new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovagues’ were especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even today: it seems there are still a handful tramping Mount Athos. They walk for their entire lives on narrow mountain paths, back and forth on a long repeated round, sleeping at nightfall wherever their feet have taken them; they spend their lives murmuring prayers on foot, walk all day without destination or goal, this way or that, taking branching paths at random, turning, returning, without going anywhere, illustrating through endless wandering their condition as permanent strangers in this profane world.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration of the presences. The walker’s immobility facing that of the landscape … it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.
— Frédéric Gros
forest paths – flat labyrinths – and gentle plains invite the walker’s body to softness, to languor. And memories arise like eddying mists. The air is more bracing with Nietzsche, and above all sharp, transparent. The thought is trenchant, the body wide awake, trembling.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first – at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lot of the poor, vagabonds and highwaymen, not to mention travelling showmen and pedlars – to conceive of the walk as a poetic act, a communion with Nature, fulfilment of the body, contemplation of the landscape. Christopher Morley wrote of him that he was ‘one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy’.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
The assumption of ‘rights’ is the cancer of privilege.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Show me the person ready to step from any, let it be the narrowest, sect of Christian Pharisees into a freer and holier air, and I shall look to find in that person the one of that sect who, in the midst of its darkness and selfish worldliness, mistaken for holiness, has been living a life more obedient than the rest.
— George MacDonald, Mary Marston
In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that “the very essence of the democratic process” is “the freedom to persuade and suggest,” what he calls “the engineering of consent.” “A leader,” he continues, “frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding … Democratic leaders must play their part in … engineering … consent to socially constructive goals and values,” applying “scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs”; and although it remains unsaid, it is evident enough that those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is “socially constructive,” to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society.
— Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.
— Lyudmila Ulitskaya, The Big Green Tent
Countries adopting free-market capitalism have increased output 70-fold, halved work days and doubled lifespans.
— Stefan Molyneux
Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.
— Coretta Scott King
Jesus never encouraged His friends to cover over the pain in their lives, but to bring it into the light, where healing is found. Sometimes we don't do that because we fear being rejected by others. Yes, rejection may well happen, but bringing the pain to the light is still the best way to live. It will take much courage, but it will bring freedom.
— Sheila Walsh, Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free
The enemy knows that without surrender, we will never experience the freedom that God offers us. Without surrender, we will remain spiritually malnourished, ill and confused. Without surrender, our foxholes become prisons of the enemy's making. Our lack of full surrender limits God's ability to both work in our lives and through our lives.God's call to surrender is not an intimidating, angry bark heard from the other side of a battlefield. God's invitation to surrender is expressed through the example of his Son, Jesus, as described in Philippians 2:5-11.
— Katherine J Walden
If I could walk one week, why not six? If I could walk to London, why not to Paris, to the Alps, to Jerusalem...I would show with money and a pair of strong boots you can get to Rome. Good-bye, all ye vampires of modern travel. Good-bye, insistent cab-men, and tip-loving porters. Good-bye, mis-directed luggage and dusty railway carriages...Good-bye, trains - punctual and unpunctual, I am your slave no longer. I am free. I am FREE.
— A.N. Cooper
In order to justify your nonsense, you continue to fight battles won long ago. You rage against threats that exist only in your mind....You focus on the colour of schoolbags, sexist pronouns, pink toys in Kinder Surprises and the sharing of dish-washing duties in relationships. All the while completely ignoring what it is that really threatens the freedom of women....Your aversion towards the patriarchy, manifested in the form of straight white males, has led you you to become bedfellows of all the other minorities who share that aversion.
— Marion Le Pen
I know it all, and I still love you." That is the convicting, convincing, liberating truth that comes from an encounter with Christ: all is known; there is no need to pretend anymore. I wrestled with that truth. It's hard to lay aside a mask when it looks just like you, and you have worn it for so long that you can't remember what you look like without it.
— Sheila Walsh, Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free
Freedom is ‘Self-earned’ and worldly life is ‘earned by egoism’!
— Dada Bhagwan
At its root, the logic is that of the Grand Inquisitor, who bitterly assailed Christ for offering people freedom and thus condemning them to misery. The Church must correct the evil work of Christ by offering the miserable mass of humanity the gift they most desire and need: absolute submission. It must “vanquish freedom” so as “to make men happy” and provide the total “community of worship” that they avidly seek. In the modern secular age, this means worship of the state religion, which in the Western democracies incorporates the doctrine of submission to the masters of the system of public subsidy, private profit, called free enterprise. The people must be kept in ignorance, reduced to jingoist incantations, for their own good. And like the Grand Inquisitor, who employs the forces of miracle, mystery, and authority “to conquer and hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness” and to deny them the freedom of choice they so fear and despise, so the “cool observers” must create the “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” that keep the ignorant and stupid masses disciplined and content.
— Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. you said it--you should have refused to go to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow; I'm a free man. I didn't have to come here!...We always think it, and say it, but we don't do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, 'I don't have to do anything, I make my own choices, I'm free.' And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till we're reposted.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Where true dignity and real freedom are undermined, real self least exists!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires.
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
The church has to show the way of freedom to the nation
— Sunday Adelaja
In forgiving others, I free myself towards belonging and wholeness, be it with the person I am forgiving, or with myself.
— Sharon Weil, ChangeAbility: How Artists, Activists, and Awakeners Navigate Change
Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that "the people" do no want freedom.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Love is about giving freedom and power, not about gaining control or possession.
— Jeffrey Fry
Don't settle your wild, find a man who doesn't want to tame it.
— Nikki Rowe
Bird of the skystill bound to the earth,soaring to unimaginable heightsyet returning to perch in the willow.Death is near, always nearand so...is lifeeven in the ashes.Rise Up Phoenix.Live. Fly. Create!
— Michele Jennae
The worst form of snobbery is to deny information
—  to anyone at all. Always remember that. Bas as it is to look down on another human being: to act as censor? Unforgivable.
You have a choice. Take hold of your future or the past will take it for you.
— Pepper D. Basham
Maybe it's easier to conform, to stay in a job I hate to pay bills of the things I don't even enjoy and marry a man I'm not passionately in love with, whilst surrounded by those who have absolutely no life to their smile but I don't want easy. I never have. I want a life so fucking grande' I reach every little milestone in sweats or tears knowing I Followed what was true to my heart. I don't care if I walk alone for the rest of my days, if it means I get to stay true to myself.
— Nikki Rowe
If a religion wants you to give up your freedom, just give up that religion! Nothing is holier than your freedom!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Each time you allow the past to hold your future, [he] steals more and more from you.
— Pepper D. Basham
In every nation’s history time comes to behave like wild horses, to refuse any kind of authority which tries to eliminate your freedom!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
While not as common as they used to be, entire groups of people with what seems like an infinite amount of time on their hands to be angry about something that doesn't even affect them in the slightest, still exist.
— Lindsey Ouimet, What's a Soulmate?
Humanity first
— Nina Leavins
Stay in your bed as long as you want. Your money just left for work.
— Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom
Rigg laughed softly at Lisa’s deadpan joke, but she halted when she noticed the back of Lisa’s neck: the factory number had been shaved away, roughly and angrily. Frowning in confusion, Rigg gently rubbed her fingers over the scrape, and Lisa flinched as if it hurt.“If someone saw this, you could be scrapped,” Rigg said anxiously. “I know,” was the soft reply. “I believe freedom is worth that risk.
— Ash Gray, The Thieves of Nottica
There are two kinds of politicians on Earth: Those who expand the freedoms and those who restrict them! The second group has no chance to triumph and they will always be remembered as spooky characters from a horror movie!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Love builds a bridge. Hate builds a wall.
— Alan Dapre
If you seek immortality, then give. For giving frees humanity from the bondage of time. When all is gone, what's left is what you gave.
— Val Uchendu
The countryside stretched green and alive from her perch on the hill....She breathed in the air of a free woman and marveled at how her clarity of spirit even seemed to affect her vision. Brighter colors. Fresher air.
— Pepper D. Basham