#po

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say? ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#freedom #gagged #living #more #nothing

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#life #personal-responsibility #freedom

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#morality #politics #wisdom #freedom

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect. ↗

— Eleanor Roosevelt

#responsibility #freedom

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#history #liberty #politics #slavery #freedom

The function of freedom is to free someone else. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#responsibility #freedom

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#freedom #responsibility #sartre #freedom

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#agitation #dissent #liberties #power #radicalism

The way of love is not a subtle argument. The door there is devastation. Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they're given wings. ↗

— Rumi

#freedom

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. ↗

— James Madison

#constitution #freedom-of-speech #freedom-of-thought #politics #freedom