Knowledge is essential to freedom.
Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of ‘them’ & widen the circle of ‘us.
Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.
One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.
Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.
Knowledge always liberates.
to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe." from Pavilion of Women page 292
The glory of science is, that it is freeing the soul, breaking the mental manacles, getting the brain out of bondage, giving courage to thought, filling the world with mercy, justice, and joy.
Illness sets the mind free sometimes to roam and surmise.
There are two ways to replace an orthodoxy: with openness or with another orthodoxy.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.
You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.
Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
The mind is fast emancipating itself from the dominion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful forces on the world.
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.
The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.
Knowledge is freedom and with freedom comes understanding.
When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.
Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.
We are slaves to whatever we don't understand.
