Freedom

Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

So hopeless is the world without, The world within I doubly prize; Thy world, where guile and hate and doubt And cold suspicion never rise; Where thou and I and Liberty Have undisputed sovereignty.

 

It’s often better to be in chains than to be free.

The only freedom the gods grant us Of our own free will to their sovereignty. Since only in the illusion of freedom

Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even, if you will, eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn’t be happy with.

Liberal institutions straightway cease to be liberal, as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

And nowhere, surely, should we discover more painful and absolute sacrifice. . . . The queen bids farewell to freedom, the light of day. . . . The workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity.

We all make our limits, and we set them further out than we have any right.

 

“I will not kiss your f.ing flag”

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

This is Liberty-Hall, gentlemen.

JUST LIVING IS NOT ENOUGH… ONE MUST HAVE SUNSHINE, FREEDOM, AND A LITTLE FLOWER.

A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and to obey.

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In cheerful godliness.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

 

I was born to know you To give you your name Freedom. 1