Fear of Freedom Quotes

... timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.

The most terrifying thing for most everybody in the whole Western World is to take responsibility for your own life and to experience real freedom.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts!

There is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and everyone of us.

And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.

those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot trust us to live in them. Trying to keep the law is actually a declaration of independence, a way of keeping control

People are terrified to be set free - they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security... How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

and i can't stand the idea of being alone. i can't bear the thought of being free.

Freedon is a scary thing. Most people don't want it.

In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom, when people all over the country fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce.

There's a natural human compulsion to chase after freedom and then to actually hand it over as fast as possible and get away from it.

What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.

A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

I think people resist freedom because they're afraid of the unknown. But it's ironic....That unknown was once very well known. It's where our souls belong....The only solution is to confront them - confront yourself - with the greatest fear imaginable. Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

At first, I didn't want to accept that I had been abducted. I kept thinking, 'Next week, I'll be freed.'

Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.

Are you so afraid that you are willing to trade your freedom for security?

Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.

Not to mention the fact that of course terrorists hate freedom. I think they do hate. But believe me, I don't think they sit there abstractly hating freedom.