Quotations about freedom: civil freedom, personal freedom — the power to choose how to act, speak, and think. Freedom can be a freedom to make one’s thoughts come to fruition in action, and thereby can involve compelling others to act, so that freedom is a power over other people. Or freedom can be to not have others compel us to act. Freedom, at its core, is about autonomy, and some versions of freedom recognize that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others.
There’s something contagious about demanding freedom.
In the long run, Women’s Liberation will of course free men — but in the short run it’s going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.
To be human is to be free. Human existence is the ability to stand back from matter and nature, to transcend it even in ourselves, the ability to consider, judge and make decisions, to create new things, to take responsibility, to change, to make oneself and the world different, and, if possible, better.
Freedom does not occur all at once, but is a potentiality that becomes a reality through nurture over time; it grows and develops…. It is at once open-ended but limited by time and space and the life cycle; it has a beginning, a fullness and a tapering off.
I believe we are here on the planet Earth to live, grow up, and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom.
To this day I believe we are here on Earth to live, grow, and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom.
I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.
To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one’s own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.
Here I am showing you the ferocity of my hunger. Here I am, finally freeing myself to be vulnerable and terribly human. Here I am, reveling in that freedom. Here. See what I hunger for and what my truth has allowed me to create.
I bid you awake at dawn and discover I have gone my way and left you free.
Every woman that finally figured out her worth, has picked up her suitcases of pride and boarded a flight to freedom, which landed in the valley of change.
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist to him also; mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other another.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating — in work, in play, in love.
Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies – to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them – brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.
Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.
Independence is happiness.
Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.
We shall some day be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.
I look for the day … when the only criterion of excellence or position shall be the ability and character of the individual; and this time will come.
Feminism’s agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to ‘choose’ between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves — instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.
Under this linguistic strategy, the New Right relabeled its resistance to women’s newly acquired reproductive rights as ‘pro-life’; its opposition to women’s newly embraced sexual freedom became ‘pro-chastity’; and its hostility to women’s mass entry into the work force became ‘pro-motherhood.’ Finally, the New Right renamed itself — its regressive and negative stance against the progress of women’s rights became ‘pro-family.’ . . .
In the ’20’s, the Ku Klux Klan had built support with a similar rhetorical maneuver, downplaying their racism and recasting it as patriotism; they weren’t lynching blacks, they were moral reformers defending the flag.
The unceasing propaganda in our time for ‘the individual’ seems to me deeply suspect, as ‘individuality’ itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising ‘individuality’ and ‘freedom’ — which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.
Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.
When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
Our attitude in the face of life’s challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.
