Freedom Paradox Quotes

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

The feeling of having no choice or no say is a fear of mine, partly because the idea of loosening oneself from the burden and responsibility of choice and consequence is so intoxicating.

He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free.

Slavery is the handmaiden of civil liberty.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Every Fourth of July, our Declaration of Independence is produced, with a sublime indignation, to set forth the tyranny of the mother country and to challenge the admiration of the world. But what a pitiful detail of grievances does this document present in comparison with the wrongs which our slaves endure!

man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

But I firmly believe that you can't be emotionally free until you are emotionally committed.

The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

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.

The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison.

Freedom is a double-edged ideal, because true freedom comes without the protection of laws that also enslave us by defining us--female, male; Christian, Islamic; good, evil. All at the whim of a frail minority.

The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.

Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in fact, hardly exists. It comes as a shock in life to learn that we usually only exchange one set of restrictions for another. The second set, however, is self-chosen, and therefore easier to accept.

The land of the free - we've got an army marching around the world under the banner of freedom, and yet, we are the most un-free society, in terms of institutions of the deprivation of liberty, of incarceration. The incidents of incarceration is higher in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.

The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be.

How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!