7,738 Quotes About Freedom

With each passing day, I allowed myself to become a little more intoxicated by limitless possibilities which seemed sometimes to roll in with the fog, murmur suggestions that would have made me run yelling from them had I been anywhere [other than San Francisco], then leave me to cope with that special brand of terror bestowed by sweet and sour tastes of freedom.

O, let my land be a land where LibertyIs crowned with no false patriotic wreath,But opportunity is real, & life is free,Equality is in the air we breathe.(There’s never been equality for me,Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

It's not clear whether, at this point, the Babiarzes fully understood that the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.

I dreaded the approach of summer, when snakes and slaveholders make their appearance. I was, in fact, a slave in New York, as subject to slave laws as I had been in a Slave State. Strange incongruity in a state called free!

How does a daughter know that she feels appropriately towards the woman who is her mother? Yes, it was difficult to know what to do with Mai, how to conceive her. I thought I hated her fawning, but what I see I hated is the degree of it. If she was fawning, she was not fawning enough. She diluted it with her spitefulness, the hopeless clawing of a small cornered spirit towards what was beyond it. And if she had spirit, it was not great enough, being shrunk by the bitterness of her temper.

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other. What a comfort it is, to be free to say so!

Any sensible human being who has traveled a bit around the world knows that freedom is a myth that doesn’t exist anywhere. They would realize that the red lines and different forms of oppression, though change from one place to another, they actually do exist everywhere based on who is in power.

To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom. We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue our freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each one of us—what is irreducibly our own—is not property or goods but the time of our lives.

Freiheit ist der Wille, gesellschaftliche Konventionen abzustreifen.