Freedom Book Quotes & Sayings

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself. — Karel Appel

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom
which is bordered on all sides by isolation
is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet. — Saul Bellow

Freedom of teaching and of opinion in book or press is the foundation for the sound and natural development of any people. — Albert Einstein

Proposed Roads to Freedom
In this book Russell weighs the respective advantages and disadvantages of Socialism, Marxism and Syndicalism. — John Stuart Mill

These men are in prison: that is the Outsider's verdict. They are quite contented in prison - caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell. — Colin Wilson

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling's world within a world; Twain's slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave? — Richard Louv

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom. — Terence McKenna

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveler, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan or Bagdat. Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste. — Henry David Thoreau

I have written this book with the conviction that the response to injury does not have to be vengeance and that we need to distinguish between revenge and justice. A response other than revenge is possible and desirable. For that to happen, however, we need to turn the moment of injury into a moment of freedom, of choice. For Americans, that means turning 9/11 into an opportunity to reflect on America's place in the world. Grief for victims should not obscure the fact that there is no choice without a debate and no democracy without choice. — Mahmood Mamdani

People quick to criticize others, but won't shine the light on themselves. You can't always judge a book by the outside appearance. You have to open it up and read in order to discover how precious it is. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories. — Jennifer Lanthier

The God I know is one that promotes peace and freedom. But I get great sustenance from my personal relationship. That doesn't make me think I'm a better person than you are, by the way. Because one of the great admonitions in the Good Book is, don't try to take a speck out of your eye if I've got a log in my own. — George W. Bush

I opposed the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I read the book and took a critical distance. I did not think The Satanic Verses is a blasphemous book. I did not consider the book as being a great read, but as an intellectual I read, I assess, and I respond. I make a difference between true freedom of expression to which we owe a response and provocation, which we ignore. — Tariq Ramadan

I was inspired to write this book by those who are sceptical of the power of freedom to change the world. — Natan Sharansky

I think her Grandmother Hall gave her a great sense of family love, and reassurance. Her grandmother did love her, like her father, unconditionally. And despite the order and the discipline - and home at certain hours and out at certain hours and reading at certain hours - there was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn't censored. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

But what Davenport had been born into had taken so much from her, leaving her with just the wickedest and the worst. Her father had given her life, and then taken every scrap of joy or freedom, and even now that he was dead, all he had left her with was a deep, abiding hatred for what she was. — Brenna Yovanoff

When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read - with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature. — Andrew Clements

The ethic of ecstasy is the opposite of the trial's ethic; under its protection everybody does whatever he wants: now anyone can suck his thumb as he likes, from infancy to graduation, and it is a freedom no one will be willing to give up; look around you on the Metro; seated or standing, every single person has a finger in some orifice of his face-in the ear, in the mouth, in the nose; no one feels he's being observed, and everyone dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self, which is picking its nose; no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others. In this situation of uniform egocentricity, the sense of guilt does not play the role it once did; the tribunals still operate, but they are fascinated exclusively by the past; they see only the core of the century; they see only the generations that are old or dead. — Milan Kundera

I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it. — Nick Clegg

I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom. — Jeanette Winterson

[W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It's the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it. — John Waters

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere. — Carla H. Krueger

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.
[from her Newberry Award acceptance speech] — Lois Lowry

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.'" Caleb nodded. "From the Book of John." "Yes," she said quietly. "It's one of my favorite verses of Scripture. In times of stress, I repeat that verse, as many times as needed. It never fails to help keep me calm. I've always found that giving Christ complete authority over my life brings an unbelievable freedom. The kind of freedom that nothing, or no one else, can. — JoAnn Durgin

Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no "correct" interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.
"Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it. — Ted Chiang

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day. — Frederick Lenz

REFLECTION. In discussing abortion, its supporters never defend the act of abortion itself, but only the alleged right of someone to have one. They focus on the freedom to choose it, but avoid describing what is chosen. — Catholic Book Publishing Corporation

Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making. — Jeffrey Tucker

I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day - I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary - and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary. — Lydia Davis

So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech. — Neil Gaiman

No book on this planet can give you the description of terms like religion, spirituality, divinity unless you discover it within the realm of your own mind. — Abhijit Naskar

In many ways, this book is not about the politicians who are turning the ANC and Nelson Mandela's legacy into a nightmare. It is about all of us, South Africans, who keep quiet when our voices are needed. It is about those of us who keep quiet when journalists like Mzilikazi wa Afrika are arrested on trumped-up charges.11 It is about those of us who have forgotten that freedom is never fully achieved, but is defended and renewed every single day, in every square inch of space we occupy in the world. If the South Africa of our dreams withers and dies, it will be because we have stepped away from the public square. Where is the real ANC? Crucially, where are the men and women who fought so valiantly for this new South Africa? — Justice Malala

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education. — Alfred Whitney Griswold

Life is loss. But out of that, as the book stresses, comes freedom. If we can accept that nothing is permanent, and change is inevitable, if we can adapt, then we're going to be happier people. — Louise Penny

By now you will not be surprised to learn that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called "Air and Dreams". he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound. joy is aerial, and the sensation of freedom defies the bonds of gravity. "Air," Bachelard writes, "is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy." Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity, inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday life. — Michael Pollan

The freedom to be someone else entirely and be different versions of something. That's what I loved and I loved watching movies and I loved watching television, I loved reading books. That kind of escapism into another world was my favorite thing. — Gwendoline Christie

When I read a daring book or listen to rebellious music, I feel like I've found what freedom really means. — Carla H. Krueger

If, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can't even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted. — Sam Harris

It is often said that freedom doesn't come free. It is also said that true heroes can come from both the most unlikely and obvious of places. I believe that. And so this book is dedicated to my heroes who fight overseas and at home. — Kelly Moran

It is hard to recognize, or even to describe, but I think this freedom is the real reason the book continues to be so well loved and so well read after all these years. I am talking about the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open, as my mother did, to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else, from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his own Benaras.
The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. — Aravind Adiga

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. — Timothy Snyder

Last of all, this book owes perhaps its biggest debt to the ultimate models for Kira and Heron and every other awesome girl in the Partials series: my two daughters. May you always have heroines to inspire you, role models to look up to, and the freedom and courage to make your own choices, no matter how simple or scary or hard or eternal they may be. — Dan Wells

Happy indeed are those days when the book-lover has been accorded the freedom of some ancient library. A delicious feeling of tranquillity pervades him as he selects some nook and settles himself to read. — P.B.M. Allan

Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper. — Nina George

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them. — Adrian McKinty

The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others. — Milton Friedman

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. — Martin Amis

Dan Brister's book bears witness to the last fifteen years of this bureaucratic madness to tame the last vestige of wild America and domesticate the earth. Leading the resistance is the Buffalo Field Campaign, a brave, dedicated group of activists. This hardy tribe lives out in the cold winters of Yellowstone, risking their freedom and lives to stand by their brown brethren in the hair coats. — Doug Peacock

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I pray moms will use ... [my] book[s] as a reference to arm themselves with God's grace and His Word to break away from the enemy's bondage and begin to experience peace and freedom in their homeschool journeys right away. — Tamara L. Chilver

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book ... — Dwight D. Eisenhower

The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.
The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.
Trial and error is freedom. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early. — Howard Nemerov

Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject. — Michel De Montaigne

What makes it worth it though, is I love drawing. I LOVE IT. I love making comics. I love starting a new page and buying new paper, ink and brushes. I love telling stories! I love the people I work with, I love the people I meet. I love thinking about the syntax and language of comics. I love esoteric discussions about the comic book industry. I love the opportunities I've had in life because of comics. The second I stop loving it I will find something else to do.
Comics are hard work. Comics are relentless. Comics will break your heart. Comics are monetarily unsatisfying. Comics don't offer much in terms of fortune and glory, but comics will give you complete freedom to tell the stories you want to tell, in ways unlike any other medium. Comics will pick you up after it knocks you down. Comics will dust you off and tell you it loves you. And you will look into it's eyes and know it's true, that you love comics back. — Becky Cloonan

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book. — Luke Rhinehart

politicians and pundits tell you what your rights are. Read this book to learn your constitutional rights and together, we can keep the spirit of freedom alive in this great nation. Click here to view this — Sean Patrick

He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye. — Graham Greene

We have more freedom of the press than any other country in a similar position. Even way back in the frightened '50s, Communists, for example, could publish their magazine. The KKK published their own books. But face it, the mass media is controlled by money. — Pete Seeger

I am writing this book as an invitation to consider the freedom found when we bring one of our most basic of needs-food-before the Lord and all Him to guide and guard us in this area. — Lysa TerKeurst

The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding. — Charlotte Mason

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Christ didn't leave us a book of instructions; He left us a body, a family - a Church. If it were perfectly clear, there wouldn't be any freedom. — Francis George

While I was fighting, I heard other people speaking in the name of freedom, and the more they defended this unique right, the more enslaved they seemed to be to their parents' wishes, to a marriage in which they had promised to stay with the other person "for the rest of their lives," to the bathroom scales, to their diet, to half-finished projects, to lovers to whom they were incapable of saying "No" or "It's over," to weekends when they were obliged to have lunch with people they didn't even like. Slaves to luxury, to the appearance of luxury, to the appearance of the appearance of luxury. Slaves to a life they had not chosen, but which they had decided to live because someone had managed to convince them that it was all for the best. And so their identical days and nights passed, days and nights in which adventure was just a word in a book or an image on the television that was always on, and whenever a door opened, they would say: "I'm not interested. I'm not in the mood. — Paulo Coelho

The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted. — Michel Onfray

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

All my life I've been involved with racial politics. I was a Freedom Rider in the South. I was the author of books on gang violence, I was a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, and when I spoke to the Black Caucus, congressional and state, I realized they were going all the way for Hillary [Clinton] and so was the Latino caucus in Sacramento and I asked myself this question: "Do I really want to cast my vote against these people who have been central to my life and to the soul of the country?" And so I went with them. Period. — Tom Hayden

Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past. — Carla H. Krueger

We are not free, it was not intended we should be. A book of rules is placed in our cradle, and we never get rid of it until we reach our graves. Then we are free, and only then. — E.W. Howe

It is a work of psychogeography, albeit in a less explicit sense than Iain Sinclair's or Will Self's. It had to be fiction though, because I needed that freedom of including whatever belonged, and cutting out whatever didn't. The main fiction in it was matching Julius' generous and self-concealing character to New York's generous and self-concealing character. I think this also adds to my answer about New York's personality in the book. — Teju Cole

As I climb aboard The Wilted Rose with Freedom Matthews I will find out what really happens to the characters in this out of this world of a book!!!!! and understand her writting and the book. — Freedom Matthews

Freedom is your birthright! — Tae Yun Kim

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights. — Lawrence Lessig

Astute social commentators had been anticipating this rightward shift since the early 1980s. Bertram Gross predicted, in his book Friendly Fascism, that the United States might arrive at a gentler form of the virulent ultranationalism, antilabor activity, and racism, which coalesced into fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Corporate America would tolerate such a rightward drift, so the argument went, because more government restrictions on personal freedom would enhance business efforts to discipline the labor force and increase corporate profits. — Steve Brouwer

A recent book by University of Chicago professor of philosophy and law Brian Leiter outlines what I believe will become the theoretical consensus that does away with religious liberty in spirit if not in letter. "There is no principled reason," he writes, "for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection." . . . Evoking the principle of fairness, Leiter argues that everybody's conscience should be accorded the same legal protections. Thus he proposes to replace religious liberty with a plenary "liberty of conscience."

Leiter's argument is libertarian. He wants to get the government out of the business of deciding whose conscience is worth protecting. This mentality seems to expand freedom, but that's an illusion. In practice it will lead to diminished freedom, as is always the case with any thoroughgoing libertarianism. — R. R. Reno

A book is the only true land of the free: within its borders, anything is possible — Agona Apell

Once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it ... others have done so ... That, in some ways, is the point of this book. Perhaps a sleep-walking murderer can plausibly argue that he wasn't aware of his habit, and so he doesn't bear responsibility for his crime, but almost all of the other patterns that exist in most people's lives - how we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend our time, attention and money - those are habits that we know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work. — Charles Duhigg

It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. — Erich Fromm

Cast by the media at the time as sporadic and less significant than the heroic, nonviolent protests in the South, the local activism that took place in the North, West, and Midwest is all but absent in the way we characterize, teach, and remember the civil rights era. In response, this book seeks to recast the visual narrative of the era by bringing the broad, nationwide struggle for black freedom into sharper view. — Mark Speltz

The year is now 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.

Camille Desmoulins, 1793: "They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer."

Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: "History is fiction. — Hilary Mantel

There exist concretely alarm clocks, signboards, tax forms, policemen, so many guard rails against anguish. But as soon as the enterprise is held at a distance from me, as soon as I am referred to myself because I must await myself in the future, then I discover myself suddenly as the one who gives its meaning to the alarm clock, the one who by a signboard forbids himself to walk on a flower bed or on the lawn, the one from whom the boss's order borrows its urgency, the one who decides the interest of the book which he is writing, the one who finally makes the values exist in order to determine his action by their demands. I emerge alone and in anguish confronting the unique and original project which constitutes my being; all the barriers, all the guard rails collapse, nihilated by the consciousness of my freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre

To The Veterans of the United States of America
Thank you, for the cost you paid for our freedom, thank you for the freedom to live in safety and pursue happiness, for freedom of speech (thus my book), and for all the freedoms that we daily take for granted. — Sara Niles

Kant comes to identify the institution of property with freedom because he sees it in a fundamental sense as an extension of the self. An object which is, he argues, my property belongs solely and exclusively to myself, and it is my right to consume or use it in whatever way I please. Indeed, so strongly does the individual feel about his ownership, Kant thinks, that if somebody takes it without his consent they harm the individual just as much as though they had injured his body. From this point of view, the individual has every justification in feeling as upset about the theft of a favourite book as he has about a bruised knee. To threaten the individual's property, in the sense of its being an extension of the self, prejudices not only his feeling of well-being but also his very existence. — Howard Williams

I'm working on this book on the trial of Socrates. It started out with the idea of the problem of freedom of thought...and expression...I started by spending a year on the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions, and I had a fascinating time. And then I felt I couldn't understand the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions without understanding the Reformation. When I got to the Reformation, I felt that I had to understand the premonitory movements that began in the Middle Ages. When I got there, I felt I had to understand the classical period." (quoted in Andrew Patner, I. F. Stone: A Portrait, p. 21) — I. F. Stone

Books are better than television, the internet, or the computer for educating and maintaining freedom.
Books matter because they state ideas and then attempt to thoroughly prove them. They have an advantage precisely because they slow down the process, allowing the reader to internalize, respond, react and transform. The ideas in books matter because time is taken to establish truth, and because the reader must take the time to consider each idea and either accept it or, if he rejects it, to think through sound reasons for doing so. A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose. — Oliver DeMille

CG Jung:Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a darker forest and a sickened forest animal. Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts. Freedom is conditional. — C. G. Jung

Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don't even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that's wrong. — Judy Blume

Poor May!" he said.
"Poor? Why poor?" she echoed with a strained laugh.
"Because I shall never be able to open a window without worrying you," he rejoined, laughing also.
For a moment she was silent; then she said very low, her head bowed over her work: "I shall never worry if you're happy."
"Ah, my dear; and I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows!"
"In THIS weather?" she remonstrated; and with a sigh he buried his head in his book. — Edith Wharton

The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word "orthodox," which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning "right opinion." These are books for which there is one and only one right reading; any other reading or interpretation is fraught with peril, from the loss of an "A" to the damnation of one's soul. This characteristic carries with it an obligation. The faithful reader of a canonical book is obliged to make sense out of it and to find it true in one or another sense of "true." If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy, or it may be his professor. In any case, he is obliged to accept the resolution of his problem that is offered him. He reads essentially without freedom; but in return for this he gains a kind of satisfaction that is possibly never obtained when reading other books. — Mortimer J. Adler

To me, my husband was my son's murderer. He was also my daughter's molester. A parasite nibbling on the Holy Book, he was Lucifer, holding me by the throat and driving me to sin every night. He was Bhai's destroyer, Amma Sain's tormentor, Ma's humbler and the people's exploiter. He was the rapist of orphans and the fiend that fed on the weak. But over and above all this, he was known to be the man closest to Allah, the one who could reach Him and save us. — Tehmina Durrani

When I wrote 'The Interestings,' I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this. — Meg Wolitzer

If people wrote their reviews on paper and put them into a real, physical library, I am sure that the Goodreads administrators would be very reluctant to pull them down from shelves and burn them. When you can get rid of a piece of writing just by clicking on a few links, there's a temptation to believe that it's less serious. But it isn't. It's just less clear what you've done. — G.R. Reader

The strength of film is its accessibility and immediacy. But the strength of books is that freedom to really depict anything you want because people are going to be reading it in private. So, I'm always trying to write with the immediacy and the constant motion of film but I'm also trying to write with the complete freedom of subject matter that books have. — Chuck Palahniuk

When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, Is this necessary at this point in the book? — Pat Conroy

With paper printed books, you have certain freedoms. You can acquire the book anonymously by paying cash, which is the way I always buy books. I never use a credit card. I don't identify to any database when I buy books. Amazon takes away that freedom. — Richard Stallman

Why don't people talk about Japan's wartime emperor Hirohito in the same breath as people do about Germany's Hitler? After all, both had an almost similar role in instigating World War II. In the West, whether it is good or bad, people take full responsibility for their actions, and they have total freedom to express their true feelings. On the contrary, here in the East, it is always the small people who take the blame and are made scapegoats. That is, for you and me, the difference between the West and the East, my friend."

My 7th book is coming....! — Tim I. Gurung

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you. — Alan Lightman

The key of life symbolizes the map of existence. Once you free yourself from all resistance, your path will become white for the remainder of the distance. — Suzy Kassem