He said to people: you’re free. And they said hooray, and then he showed them what freedom costs and they called him a tyrant and, as soon as he’d been betrayed, they milled around a...

a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which...

It’s a thrill to be on Columbia Records. Columbia has been home to a lot of my favorite artists — like Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and Bruce Springsteen — and it feels great to be...

It stank pretty bad, of course: manure was caked all over the wagon. But we were free. Right then I was elated with a sense of how faithful God is to his promises; I was...

Now, it is frequently asserted that, with women, the job does not come first. What (people cry) are women doing with this liberty of theirs? What woman really prefers a job to a home and...

Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave,...

Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism

A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each...

The factory of love encompasses all, but on some days, does it seem to be one of suffocation, squeezing its target too tightly? And on other days not tight enough? Or maybe that is the...

I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future,...

The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.

Please tell me a story about a girl who gets away.”I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?””From...

To claim that one can be happy without being free is to prove that one has no idea what happiness means.

The most important freedom is the freedom to be all you’re destined to be

How wonderful it must be, I thought, to be able to just spread your wings whenever you like without someone following you around trying to swat you out of the sky.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my...

At some point, one asks, “Toward what end is my life lived?” A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty...

We smoked fat cigars by the campfire and they tasted like wood and ash. The inhale and exhale was exciting. Blowing smoke rings in the calm forest air was followed by a deep swallow of...

What more proof do you need to illustrate how America is the land of the free than the fact that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world?

Freedom is not to defy, it is to co-exist. It is a challenge for the imagination

The popular image [in England] of Bonaparte as a blood-stained tyrant and bandit was admittedly exaggerated, but instinct told even the most radical among the English that if liberty, equality, and justice were ever to...

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and...

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is,...

I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone...

Der Präventionsstaat muss […] dem Bürger immer mehr Freiheiten nehmen, um ihm dafür Sicherheit zu geben.

I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.

Lights,” I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.

Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Ah, lust. It makes us forget anything we want to. The greatest relaxant, the greatest stimulant.

Freedom of religion is not enough; we need the extinction of it, because no one has turned to be a religious by their own choice.

For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done...

Artists, by their free expressions, encourage others to be free. This is the quality that makes works of art enduring.

Some canaries love their cages, they even call them home.

Wir sind das Volk!”Dieser Satz hat uns gelehrt, dass wir, wenn wir unserer Sehnsucht glauben und ihr vertrauen, die Angst verlieren können. Eine Angst, die willfährige Dienerin jeder Art von nicht legitimierter Herrschaft ist, die...

Why should the constitution of a peaceful individual hold less weight than the constitution of a nation?

If you’ve been exiled, why don’t you send me word of yourself? People do send word. Have you stopped loving me? No, for some reason I don’t believe that. It means you were exiled and...

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

Music made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her, and while she knew there were people and responsibilities in the darkness beyond it, she couldn’t...

Because Freedom is the most important thing on life, let me Be.

I once had a dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished...

If you need a reason to get involved in world politics, all you need to do is watch a playground of children for awhile. Imagine a world that happy and free all the time, that...

The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.

We’re fighting for unhappiness?” Noah asked skeptically. “It sounds a bit crazy when you put it that way.”Nijinsky laughed, delighted. “Oh, it is.” Then, serious again, he said, “We fight for the right to be...

Don’t you miss it?” I say. “Being free.”He laughs.

Being free is as difficult and as perpetual — or rather fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good jew or...

It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they...

Every soul yearns for freedom.

But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure...