Famous Quotes & Sayings

Pema Chodron

Discomfort of any kind becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing our pain is shared.

Pema Chodron

When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda.

Pema Chodron

We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake.

Philip Pullman

No one has the right to live without being shocked.

Rabindranath Tagore

Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

Han Suyin

I had to learn that there is more to the human being than material comfort, more than success, more even than national spirit or patriotism. That in any being worthy of being human there is also a demand for justice, for liberty, and that justice needs the evidence of all our lives, liberty is one and indivisible and collective, and no one can talk of justice solely for expediency's sake, nor of liberty while human beings, anywhere else on earth, are still in bondage.

Gustave Courbet

The state is not competent in artistic matters... When the state leaves us free, it will have carried out its duty.

Gustave Courbet

When I am dead, let it be said of me: he belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, and least of all, to any regime except the regime of liberty.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

John Dryden

Freedom which in no other land will thrive, Freedom an English subject's sole prerogative.

John Dryden

I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

John Dryden

O freedom, first delight of human kind!

John Locke

Is it worth the name of freedom to be at liberty to play the fool?

John Locke

Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

John Locke

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

John Lindsay

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.

Katherine Anne Porter

Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.

Katherine Anne Porter

Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.

Katherine Anne Porter

Eventually women will learn there's no such thing as freedom. Their husbands are just as fastened to the deck as they are. Men get onto a treadmill and never got off.

Katharine Graham

News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.

Joseph Cook

Safe popular freedom consists of four things, the diffusion of liberty, of intelligence, of property, and of conscientiousness, and cannot be compounded of any three out of the four.

Joseph de Maistre

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

Langston Hughes

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Langston Hughes

I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Karl Kraus

Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.

Julius Nyerere

Freedom to many means immediate betterment, as if by magic. Unless I can meet at least some of these aspirations, my support will wane and my head will roll just as surely as the tickbird follows the rhino.

Joyce Cary

The principal fact of life is the free mind.

Oswald Spengler

Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.

Otto von Bismarck

Laws are like sausages. You sleep far better the less you know about how they are made.

Ossie Davis

It is necessary to stay on the march, to be on the journey, to work for peace wherever we are at all times, because the liberty we cherish, which we would share with the world, demands eternal vigilance.

June Jordan

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

June Jordan

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...