c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.
— Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us and the soul becomes anew what it once was and will surely be again
— Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
I met Baba Yaga at the end of childhood – past pigtails and fairytales, but not quite ready to give up on make-believe.
— Kirsty Logan, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales
A child with minimal video and TV exposure... might be more naive about social ills but at the same time more sophisticated in inner direction, self-discipline, and the realities of her actual physical world.
— Diane Medved, Saving Childhood
their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.
— Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Arabella dangled her legs out of the bedroom window and closed her eyes. She felt a butterfly brush against her knee, rubbed her skin against the mortar and bricks, drank in the warmth of the morning sunshine on her face, her arms, her feet.
— Pauline Fisk, Midnight Blue
The poor lads called and called, but they were grown and had forgotten the best places to hide.
— J Anderson Coats, Wicked and the Just
Arabella dangled her legs out of the bedroom window and closed her eyes. She felt a butterfly brush against her knee, rubbed her skin against the mortar and bricks, drank in the warmth of the morning sunshine on her face, her arms her feet.
— Puline Fisk
The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden
—  what is forbidden is to write about it.
I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a childhood that was _not_ like mine. I have no real frame of reference, but when I question strangers I've found that their childhood generally had much less blood in it, and also that strangers seem uncomfortable when you question them about their childhood. But really, what else are you going to talk about in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems like the natural choice, since it's the reason why most of us are in line there to begin with.
— Jenny  Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir
Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.
— Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret
The world would be a brighter, happier place, if we could only remember our childhood wonder.
— P.J. Roscoe, Freya's Child
...even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.
— Julianna Baggott, Fuse
I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
I have heard it said that a happy childhood is a curse, because what follows can never measure up. All I can say is, those people must want too much; they can't accept that life is a series of struggles and that happiness can be found in overcoming them, drawing strength from the reserves laid down in the good years.
— Deborah Lawrenson, The Lantern
I had heard my brothers and sisters use curse words but had never dared use one myself in front of anyone. But I had practiced alone in my room lots of times, trying out different cadences and into nations: 'Fuck, fuck, fuck you, fucknut. Shit, shitstain, fucker! Go fuck a duck, you asswipe!' My favorite was, 'What a fucking cocksucker.' The plan was to say this casually to one of my new friends while one of our teachers walked by. No one in kindergarten ever really got my sense of humor, so I was hell-bent on making my mark in the first grade.
— Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
Rage swept over her at being young, young and little, as if some evil fairy had put that spell on her. Why must you be locked up in this dreadful cage of childhood for twenty or a hundred years? Nothing in life was possible unless you were old and rich, until then you were only small and futile before your tormentors, desperately waiting for the release that only years could bring.
— Dawn Powell, Dance Night
We grew up in a place without a hint of love. Perhaps this was the single thing that bound us forever.
— Vadim Babenko, Semmant
Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.
— Shannon A. Thompson, 2013: A Stellar Collection
I'm not sure who invented dodgeball, but I can almost guarantee you that it wasn't the shortest kid in the class.
— John Bingham, An Accidental Athlete: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Middle Age
When I was a little kid I had a very different meaning of life; simple like a cup of tea with sugar and a piece of cake, today the whole world doesn’t give me that life.
— M.F. Moonzajer
I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.
— Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. Have you ever seen a baby bouncing up and down in the crib in time to some music? When you think of it, some of that baby's first messages from his or her parents may have been lullabies, or at least the music of their speaking voices. All of us have had the experience of hearing a tune from childhood and having that melody evoke a memory or a feeling. The music we hear early on tends to stay with us all our lives.
— Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember
Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
— Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
— Ryū Murakami, 69
Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth.
— bell hooks, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
— Adam Phillips, On Balance
I remember my own childhood vividly..I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them. (In conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993)
— Maurice Sendak
Somehow, the days of summer with their glimmering enchantment of dancing ladybugs and sailing clouds had faded into grey. Maddie’s heart had somehow faded with it.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness
It's remarkable the logic we'll build around a misapprehension.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
And so it is becomes important to protect the innocence in children, to prolong their understanding of the two worlds, because innocence like any other thing does not have a lastingness and so the idea is to bring them up beyond the concepts of truth and falsehood, leave it to time for it is a valuable teacher and ensure that they come out of it, all of it unscathed.
— Chirag Tulsiani
You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old house burst open and while I was still dozing away my parched existence, drop by drop I heard the music of coolness awaken the thirst under my dry soul. And leaning over the dark shaft of my life, I saw my childhood springs unearthed. Is that always how (by accident) we rediscover Magdalenian riches?
— Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone.
— bell hooks, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life
Whatever we know as children, this is the world, eaten whole and without question.
— Debra Dean, The Mirrored World
Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2
It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.
— Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward
Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Being a child is such a shining gift, yet we don't know how precious it is until it's worn out and gone away.
— Storm Constantine, Thin Air
Most kids don't give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. who can't play baseball or at least come in third in the local circle jerk is everybody's fifth wheel.
— Stephen King, Rage
A child playing with its father screams louder, laughs harder, jumps more eagerly, puts more faith in everything.
— Lydia Netzer
And on some level it walways felt like kids paying at being grown
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
No matter where you came from, there was something, someone out in the world or under the bed that frightened you as a child. The dark shapes that lurked on the edge of the world, the ones you knew were real because even adults feared them -- because the adults had grown up fearing them.
— Erin M. Evans, Lesser Evils
A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It's scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you're going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you're the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too.
— Suzanne Palmieri, The Witch of Little Italy
There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester....Barrett's afternoonishness was far more supple and engaging. It superimposed the hippie cult of eternal solstice on the pre-teatime daydreams of one's childhood, occasioned by a slick of sunlight on a chest of drawers....His afternoonishness is lit by an importunate adult intelligence that can't quite get back to the place it longs to be....Barrett created the same precocious longing in adolescents."I remember 'See Emily Play' drifting across a school corridor in 1967...and I remember the powerful wish to stay suspended indefinitely in that music...I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn't pos
— Jeremy Harding
I try to cherish the moments I have, for I dread the day I get out of the tub and the wrinkles won't go away...
— Gabe A. Lopez
But we left camp after a while and we was driving in a real spooky place cause all the roads up near camp are dark and in the woods and we had to drive for a while to get to a highway cause there was no street lights or anything and nothing but woods and my dad asked me if I had a good time and I told him I did, but that’s really a lie and I felt like telling him what it was like at that mean old camp, but I thought he’d get mad and tell me I’m making it up and I thought I’d tell him some other time like Febuary and cause I didn’t think he’d believe me anyway, but so I changed my mind and then I thought I should tell him now cause he’ll wonder howcome I never told him sooner, so when he said that’s a nasty gash and when he said what did I do, stumble on the trail and hit a big rock or something? I told him no and I told him that lots of bad things happened to me at camp and that I never want to go there again cause I hate it and I almost cried. But he said I always had a bibid emigination cause he’s sure it wasn’t that bad! And I don’t know about those big words either, but what he said made me kind of mad cause grownups always think they know what happened to you better than you do yourself.
— Timothy Victor Richardson, Morning Song
Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes.
— Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
— Fred Rogers
We're children. We're supposed to be childish.
— George R.R. Martin
Childhood was the past. It couldn't be changed, only remembered.
— Aleatha Romig, Consequences
It is time for a return to childhood, to simplicity, to running and climbing and laughing in the sunshine, to experiencing happiness instead of being trained for a lifetime of pursuing happiness. It is time to let children be children again.
— L.R. Knost
I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.
— Bauvard, The Prince Of Plungers
It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.
— Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland
When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.
— Winston S. Churchill
Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.
— George Orwell, 1984
Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…
— Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
I've always been serious that way, trying to evolve to a more conscious state. Funny thing about that,though. You tweak yourself,looking for more love, less lust, more compassion, less jealousy. You keep tweaking, keep adjusting those knobs until you can no longer find the original settings. In some sense,the original settings are exactly what I'm looking for-a return to the easygoing guy i was before my world got complicated, the nice guy who took things as they came and laughed so hard the blues would blow away in the summer wind.
— Bill Withers
Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Summer days, and the flat water meadows and the blue hills in the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don’t mistake what I’m talking about. It’s not that I’m trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know that’s all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster, I’ll tell you about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all that. Needless to say he’s got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn’tgive a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things - that’s about as near to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.
— George Orwell, Coming Up for Air
It reminded me of how children always thought too big
—  how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.
Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late.
— Samuel Beckett, As the Story Was Told
The stove, she knew, wished it were a volcano, the humble teaspoons wished they were steamshovels, and the sink wished it were a well so all the others could have their wishes. Yet they all stayed exactly the same no matter what they wished, no matter what they saw and heard.
— Georgess McHargue, Stoneflight
She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?"I said I thought the description fairly apt.
— Susan Hubbard, The Society of S
Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
What a tremendous power one needs to become his own master!
— Mihail Drumeş, Elevul Dima dintr-a VII-A
... I wrote about ... my childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.
— Sarah Winman
Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it's the book of my adulthood too. It's a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to editions that I've had and lost, with various illustrators' work in them. It brings back moments sitting reading it with my mother. It brings back my first contact with the Disney cartoon. It brings back standing in the play-yard when I was a kid, when the wind was really blowing, and closing my eyes, spreading my arms and pretending I could fly. It brings back childhood dreams of flying. It brings back the first encounter I ever had with an invented world... Never Never Land was really the first journey I took to an invented world which I believed in wholly and completely. I remember the immense solidarity that I felt with the Lost Boys, with Peter, with the Indians - how much I wanted to be a Red Indian - how much the saving of Tiger Lily meant to me as a kid, how much I wanted to one day wake up and save an Indian squaw from drowning.
— Clive Barker
Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
I tried to show him things, but he didn't seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he just put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed him Tabasco sauce and he yelled. Having a little brother helped me learn to relate to other people. Being a little brother, Snort learned to watch what he put in his mouth.
— John Elder Robison, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
In the tell-me-again times, (…) when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed star and then she'd bundle me back up in her arms. I'd wake in the morning tangled in her hair.
— Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Uses for Boys
I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot
— David Foster Wallace
We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.
— Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
You're a kid,' said Alexandra. 'There is no just about it. Only adults say just a kid and what the heck do they know about anything? Have you looked at their world lately?
— A.J. Hartley, Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact
I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the larger thing: my mother's house becoming every other house as I once had seen it, sitting atop the southern end of a broad river valley, close enough to the the mountains that every few years a scared black bear would wander down into the remaining forest, and close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they'd go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, "We are lost; therefore we will call this home." And close enough that as a child I had been teased by older kids who said if I only tried hard enough I would smell salt water, and I, believing, stood among the light poles and the gulls in the parking lots of A&Ps and cried when I knew that it was true despite the fact that they had meant to lie, as children sometimes do.
— Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
Be nice to your children. They may grow up to be writers.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes
—  that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.
They say a happy childhood is a lousy preparation for life. Kids who spend their playground days fat, ginger or gay know the truth. The world has always been full of vicious predators. For plenty of people this carnage and savagery is business as usual.
— Adam Baker, Outpost
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
— George Orwell
There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.
— Philip K. Dick
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
— Samuel Adams
I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.
— Ronald Reagan
Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
A right delayed is a right denied.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy
—  they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.
And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare.
— Malcolm X
Being an American is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn't happen.
— Herb Ritts
The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellowmen.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
— Ronald Reagan
. . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson
What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?
— Patrick Henry
When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.
— Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
— Plato, The Republic
I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra
— José Rizal, Noli Me Tángere
Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see. 
— Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
And I wonder how Gage knew this is what my soul has craved. He turns me to face him, his eyes searching. It occurs to me that no one in my life has ever concerned himself so thoroughly with my happiness.
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
— Sigmund Freud
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
— Bertrand Russell
A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.
— Ronald Reagan
Asking an eight-year-old girl if something is a little over-the-top is like asking a Texan if there are too many jalapenos in the salsa. The answer is always no." -Liberty Jones
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
His kisses tapped into deep mines of memory, and the years that had separated us fell away as if they were nothing.
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.
— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
— Christopher Hitchens
The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
— James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison
Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
Rights mean you have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor....I, in a way, don’t like to use those terms: gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious rights. There’s only one type of right. It’s the right to your liberty.
— Ron Paul
It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson
If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.
— Graceanne A. Decandido
What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law...
— Martin Luther
So if you were dating the UPS guy, he could buy you whatever the hell he wanted. But I cant."well...yes, but I'd never date the UPS guy. Those brown shorts are just not a turn-on for me.
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] ... by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks ... to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.
— Winston S. Churchill
Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.
— Daniel Webster
Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
— Charles Bradlaugh
The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?
— Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century
Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.
— Thomas Szasz
So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...
— William Faulkner
All utopias are dystopias. The term "dystopia" was coined by fools that believed a "utopia" can be functional.
— A.E. Samaan
You're so full of it, darlin'.
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
Countrymen: I have given proofs, as well as the best of you, of desiring liberty for our country, and I continue to desire it. But I place as a premise the education of the people, so that by means of instruction and work they may have a personality of their own and that they may make themselves worthy of that same liberty. In my writings I have recommended the study of the civic virtues, without which there can be no redemption. I have also written (and my words have been repeated) that reforms, to be fruitful, must come from above, that those which spring from below are uncertain and insecure movements. Imbued with these ideas, I cannot do less than condemn, and I do condemn, this absurd, savage rebellion, planned behind my back, which dishonors the Filipinos and discredits those who can speak for us. I abominate all criminal actions and refuse any kind of participation in them, pitying with all my heart the dupes who have allowed themselves to be deceived. Go back, then, to your homes, and may God forgive those who have acted in bad faith.
— José Rizal
For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
— Thomas Paine, The Crisis
One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
— Henrik Ibsen
But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt,And by thir vices brought to servitude,Than to love Bondage more than Liberty,Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty;
— John Milton, Samson Agonistes
I looked down at the brochure nearest me."We're going to Nigeria," I threatened. "I hope you like elephant polo." -Liberty Jones
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
I think you could probably thaw out a glacier, honey." -Hardy Cates
— Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.
— Man Ray
The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days
—  they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose lib
In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.
— Franz Kafka
There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings
— Alfred de Musset, Lorenzaccio
From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of those who threaten it.
— U.S. Department of the Navy
The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.
— Thomas Jefferson
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
— John Stuart Mill
Liberty will not descend to a people. A people must raisethemselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
— Charles Caleb Colton
I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.
— Edward Snowden
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
— Henry David Thoreau
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.
— James Madison, Federalist Papers By James Madison: Federalist No. 10, Federalist No. 45, Federalist No. 51, Federalist No. 44, Federalist No. 47
To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrant. It is its natural manure.
— Thomas Jefferson
What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? 
— Alexis de Tocqueville
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.
— William Ellery Channing
There’s no question about freedom of speech when everyone thinks exactly the same and no one says anything out of the accepted norms. In this kind of climate, even the mildest questions sound like heresy, and the outcome is intolerance of other people’s beliefs, ideas, actions and freedoms.
— Keith Harmon
The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes imposs
— Salman Rushdie
Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.
— Benjamin Rush
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced sil
— Louis D. Brandeis