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Freedom

It is hard to free fools from chains they revere.

- Voltaire

...a distorted development of autonomy is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings.

- Arno Gruen (The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women)

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos, is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

- Alan Watts (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

- Vernon Howard

Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

- Tao Te Ching

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

- Bertrand Russell

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom lies in being bold.

- Robert Frost

The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.

- Thucydides (Ancient Greek historian and author, 460-404bc)

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.

- Mahatma Gandhi

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

- Albert Camus

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

- Denis Diderot

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

- Ayn Rand

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will often be lonely, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

- Fredrick Nietzsche

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

- Frederick Douglass (American Abolitionist, Lecturer, Author and Slave, 1817-1895)

Better to starve free than be a fat slave.

- Aesop

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

- Voltaire

Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.

- Benjamin Franklin

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.

- Dorothy Thompson

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

All good things are wild, and free.

- Henry David Thoreau

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

- Albert Einstein

I would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs. They don’t want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense, like constructive work in a way they control, or maybe control together with others. I don’t know any way to prove this. It’s really a hope about what human beings are like, a hope that if social structures change sufficiently, those aspects of human nature will be realized.

- Noam Chomsky

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.

- Andre Gide

Freedom is a package deal - with it comes responsibilities and consequences.
- Unknown

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.

- Epictetus

Freedom is the last thing he wants. He functions, as we shall see, according to the principle of pleasure in non freedom. To be sentenced to life long freedom is a worse fate then life long slavery. To put it another way: a man is always searching for someone or something to enslave him, for only as a slave does he feel secure.

- Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man)

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

- Walter Cronkite

Any existence deprived of freedom is a kind of death.

- Gen Michel Aoun

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

- Jonathan Swift

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

- Ayn Rand

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.

- Jacob Hornberger

Free people can say no. Free people can refuse demands for their money, time, and children. Slaves cannot. There is no freedom without the freedom to say no. If someone demands that you do something and you can say no and refuse to do it, then you are a free human being. If you can be forced to do something or surrender something that you do not wish to, then you are a slave. No other test need be applied.
- Michael Rivero