Paradox of Freedom Quotes

An ideal and flawless freedom, "complete freedom", enabling without disabling, is I believe an oxymoron in metaphysics as much as it is an unreachable goal in social life.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.

Freedom is an illusion. It always comes at a price.

Every good teacher and every good parent has somehow learned to negotiate the paradox of freedom and discipline. We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations.

Human nature is full of riddles; . . . one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?'

Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.

The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.

Life forgets me but will not let me forget Holds me down and tells me that I'm free.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.

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 idea of 'Freedom's Goblin,' to me, leads to a wild conversation. I would hope that father and son, driving home from the record store, could have a conversation about what that title means. Because to me, it's the duality of being free: the evil and the good, and how it's a constant paradox.

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

Freedom comes with the impossibility of choosing.

The very forces that liberty has set free work against the dangerous consequences of liberty.