#nation

I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else. I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die. ↗

— Paul Auster

#freedom #life #philosophy #self-determination #change

Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. ↗

— Lucille Ball

#communist #freedom #national-heritage #politics #rights

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. ↗

— James Madison

#could #freedom #midst #nation #preserve

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices. ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#fate #free #predestination #will #freedom

[I]n the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin. ↗

— Elizabeth I Tudor

#dignity #freedom #good-governance #government #independence

If [God] send me no husband, for the which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening ... ↗

— William Shakespeare

#blessings #empowerment #freedom #happiness #husbands

If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning. ↗

— Stephen King

#fate #free-will #freedom #freedom

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations...entangling alliances with none ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#foreign-policy #friendship #honesty #nations #peace

There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying. ↗

— John Philip Sousa

#although #balance #better #cases #combination

I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn't have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn't exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives. ↗

— Lloyd Alexander

#imagination #literature #music #reading #science