7,738 Quotes About Freedom

People endorse negative liberty - the individual free of the State - and hate positive liberty - the individual harnessed by the State.

A people, not a parchment, and not a Supreme Court, must be the Constitution. The people are the walking, talking, living Constitution. Positive liberty is all about enshrining the Constitution in the citizens themselves. They live and breathe it, and always know how to do right by it.

Integrity is something we show, not proclaim.

I shake my head, horrified. "How can you say that? We've stayed free. We've struggled so hard to stay free."She shrugs. "Maybe. Or maybe we've been captured by what you call freedom.

Nobody is ever free, even on the outside. Those persons merely had the illusion of freedom. They worked to pay taxes on their income, taxes on everything they consumed until death, and, if they were lucky enough to have accumulated a few dollars they didn’t spend, that would be consumed in taxes on their final exit.

Our way of life is inherently based on masters and slaves. We bow to assorted Gods, like slaves bowing to masters. We bow to monarchs and presidents, to the rich, to celebrities. We never tire of bowing to others and getting on our knees. We are controlled at every turn. Isn’t it time to unshackle ourselves, to stand up straight for once? Isn’t it time to bring an end to the master-slave dialectic?

If we ask the state to guarantee our freedoms and ensure that justice is done, who guarantees that it does so?

Read Nietzsche. Reject all mainstream religions. Your objective is not to worship God, but to become God. Only God has all the answers to the mysteries of life. Therefore if you truly seek those answers then you are seeking the ultimate secret: how to transform yourself into God. It is precisely with this quest that the Philosopher’s Stone and the Holy Grail are intimately involved. That is why they have supreme spiritual power, why they command such enduring fascination.

Sade and Genet both achieved freedom by squeezing it out of their characters. If Apollinaire was right to describe Sade, who spent more than half his adult life in prison, as 'the most free spirit that ever lived', this is how he achieved freedom.