Lawrence Lessig Quotes

We need not be prisoners of our history.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past

We can't be beholden to the past.

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom to all.

You don't have to stay where you are; you can make a change.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

We don't have to be imprisoned by the past. When something isn't working, we can and should change.

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.

We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place.

Change' - Obama's election mantra - is a direct, in-your-face affront to the very vision of our Founding Fathers.

If we remain hostage to our past, then we will go nowhere.

The shell must break before the bird can fly.

It does not matter what you call the gaoler so long as he has the key that will open the door of your prison! Similarly, as I have the key to release Life from its prison, it does not matter in the least what you call either the key or myself. I am not concerned about the title.

History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.

Freedom is about stopping the past.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

See, even if you're stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you're stuck, then you will immediately recognise that you can't go on that way anymore. So, just saying precisely, writing precisely how you're stuck, or how you're alienated, opens up a door of freedom for you.

Shaking off restrictive chains requires action. They cannot be wished away. A declaration will never break chains. It requires commitment, self-discipline, and work.

I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

Your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

The world is starving for leaders who are not afraid to dismantle the sacred and precious beliefs, which hold us as prisoners of the past.

Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.