Quotes about freedom

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

School-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies — such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: "Then," I cried, half desperate, "grant me at least a new servitude!"Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me downstairs.

The idea, to a cat, that somebody else owns him is ludicrous.

There are skies we have not seen yet! There are whole realms still unvisited by us. We will not be penned in even a giant's pen. We fly!

As Gandhi taught, freedom can be reclaimed only by refusing to cooperate with unjust, immoral laws. The fight for truth—employing the principles of civil disobedience, nonviolence, and noncooperation—is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth. (p184)

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

"I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me."

"I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in—like peace and justice and freedom."

Dreaming is like—it’s like being a slave. Your dreams come out of all the parts of you that you don’t have any control over.

Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live, — a Negro and a Negro's son. Holding in that little head — ah, bitterly! — the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand — ah, wearily! — to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty is a lie.

“A teacher?” Vyborg gasped. “They got rid of him in Mexico because he was teaching unauthorized garbage. Do you want him teaching his blasphemies here?”

Berkowitz’s smile diminished by less than a millimeter. “Freedom of thought is not blasphemous, Sammi. He’s a great teacher.”

He didn’t care what she thought, and, in not caring, he felt as if a curse were lifted from his back.