Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Alan Watts

As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

Chogyam Trungpa

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Chogyam Trungpa

When you drop your unnecessary things, you finally can swoop and fly in vast space. It is so blue, so bright, and so nice, so airy and fresh. You can stretch your wings and breathe the air. You can do anything you want. You have experienced cheerfulness and joy, and finally the bliss of freedom occurs in you.

Dave Barry

Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.

Byron Katie

There is no thought or situation that you can't put up against inquiry. Every thought, every person, every apparent problem is here for the sake of your freedom.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

What we think about when we are free to think about what we will – that is what we are or will soon become.

Ai Weiwei

The freedom of speech is an important yardstick for a society's level of civilization.

Ai Weiwei

Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

Edward Gibbon

Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.

David Hockney

When you're very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It's quite exciting, and you're prepared to do anything.

Arnold J. Toynbee

We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.

Arnold J. Toynbee

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.

Dennis Kucinich

There's a type of freedom that occurs when everything that you've believed in and worked for is shattered, because then you have the opportunity to rebuild and to put yourself back together in a new way.

Dennis Kucinich

That is the America which stands not in pursuit of an axis of evil, but which is itself at the axis of hope and faith and peace and freedom.

Deepak Chopra

When you are completely free from boundaries, you don't have to have a huge number of material things. You already own something far more precious. You own yourself.

Deepak Chopra

Being free brings a lightness, a carefree surrender to all that is happening around you, and, above all, an acceptance of reality.

Deepak Chopra

Forgiveness is attention without judgment. It heals the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.

Edward Everett

Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace or after ages of conflict and war, but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred.

Edward Gibbon

In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I should not dare to call my soul my own.

Edward Kennedy

In the United States Senate, one of the things I observed in the early days - and it's still used - and that is that you take someone's argument and then you misrepresent it and misstate and disagree with it. And it's very effective. I've done it myself a number of times. But eventually, eventually people catch on.

Bill Moyers

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

Bertolt Brecht

Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.

Bernard Baruch

The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.

Carol Moseley Braun

Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.

Carlos Castaneda

The third point of reference is freedom of perception; it is intent; it is spirit; the somersault of thought into the miraculous; the act of reaching beyond our boundaries and touching the inconceivable.

Thomas Paine

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Alan K. Simpson

There is no 'slippery slope' toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

Alan Kay

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.