Quotes about freedom

[T]he modern world fails to square liberty with equality.

What devious designs freedom requires. One must worry about the strength of a principle when it must compromise itself so often to survive.

When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I'm tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before.

"What do you live for?" I ask her suddenly. "Is it for me?Is it for family and love? Or is it for some dream?"

"It's not just some dream, Darrow. I live for the dream that my children will be born free. That they will be what they like.That they will own land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

She kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

"Death isn't empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, fear of death.I say we break those chains.Break the chains of fear and you break the chains that bind us to the Golds, to the Society. Could you imagine it?"

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task.

More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.

You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.

"I think it is very good that she has learned to read," I said. "It is her own freedom." (chapter 17 p118)

'Freedom is a passing thing,' a man said. 'Someone can always come and snatch it away.' (p212)

It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.

“If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?”