Freedom To Decide Quotes & Sayings

Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable ... it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked. — Friedrich Hayek

This freedom from decision making is crucial, because when I have to decide - which often involves resisting temptation or postponing gratification - I tax my self-control. — Gretchen Rubin

Only you can decide what you become. — Seth Adam Smith

If I decide to help you, I want only two things in return. Freedom for my people" - it was what he planned to bargin for all along, and one bargain was good as any other - "and possessiom of the girl."
"I'm afraid she's not on the table," Blue eyes said.
"Of course she isn't on the table," he said confused. "She's right in front of you. — Gene Showalter

Only when you decide to truly live can you be free of your fears, and only when you are free of your fears can you truly live. — Bryant McGill

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us. — Stephen R. Covey

Why can't you just understand that not having a plan is my plan?" Chris implored. "I don't know exactly where I'll be. That's the whole point, the freedom of it. I've been so structured with school and sports and work - everything has been scheduled and laid out for me. I just want to get out of that mundane existence and purely enjoy life for a while. I'll decide on the fly where I want to go next. — Carine McCandless

Restrictionistic ideas have never met with any measure of popular sympathy except after a time of monetary depreciation when it has been necessary to decide what should take the place of the abandoned inflationary policy. — Ludwig Von Mises

In place of the clear and rigid ancient law, You [oh Lord] made man decide about good and evil for himself, with no other guidance than Your example. But did it never occur to You that man would disregard Your example, even question it, as well as Your truth, when he was subjected to so fearful a burden as freedom of choice? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Liberal Democracy is all about extending choice. Give people the option to decide their retirement age, and you immediately extend their freedom in a very significant way. — Charles Kennedy

I have that precious commodity - freedom. I can live my life a day at a time, and I am open to whatever the next day brings. I know I sound as if I have been off with some guru in India, but I haven't. I've come to realise the value of being able to decide for oneself. — Cherie Lunghi

The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom. — Ian Buruma

No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. — CrimethInc.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. — Richard Feynman

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you'll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart. — Catherynne M Valente

For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man's freedom reaches its highest point. There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself. — Bernard Lonergan

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

My decision isn't as important as the freedom to decide. And my income isn't as important as what I do to earn it. — Robin Sacredfire

I do not really know if it is a gain to exchange the crown of martrydom with two or three years of life in freedom. But I leave the good Lord to decide. — Pavel Peter Gojdic

We cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide ... t here is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning. — Ronald Reagan

The only way you will ever be free is when you decide you have had enough of living up to the standards other people force upon you through shame. Never wear their chains of judgment when they can't break free of their own. — Shannon L. Alder

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

One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called "the last of the human freedoms" - the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Viktor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response. — Stephen R. Covey

He is free knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide. — Salvador De Madariaga

If you enjoy sex or explore aspects of your sexual identity using technology, that experience should belong to you. Only you should get to decide whether it was a good or bad thing to do. — Violet Blue

The journey to financial freedom starts the MINUTE you decide you were destined for prosperity, not scarcity- for abundance, not lack. Isn't there a part of you that has always known that? Can you see yourself living a bounteous life- a life of more than enough? It only takes one minute to decide. Decide now. — Mark Victor Hansen

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond. — Jeffrey T. Borenstein

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name. — Friedrich Hayek

One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face - suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom. — George Orwell

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another. — Sigmund Freud

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum ... and one night, one night they decide they don't like living in an asylum any more. They decide they're going to escape! So, like, they get up onto the roof, and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in the moon light ... stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend didn't dare make the leap. Y'see ... Y'see, he's afraid of falling. So then, the first guy has an idea ... He says 'Hey! I have my flashlight with me! I'll shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me!' B-but the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says ... He says 'Wh-what do you think I am? Crazy? You'd turn it off when I was half way across! — Alan Moore

We'll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we're young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We'll grow until we're braver. We'll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it's time to stop. — Lauren DeStefano

There's a special freedom for girls; it doesn't get written down in constitutions; there's this freedom where they use you how they want and you say I am, I choose, I decide, I want - after or before, when you're young or when you're a hundred - it's the liturgy of the free woman - I choose, I decide, I want, I am - and you have to be a devout follower of the faith, a fanatic of freedom, to be able to say the words and remember the acts at the same time; devout. You really have to love freedom, darling; be a little Buddha girl, no I, free from the chain of being because you are empty inside, no ego, Freud couldn't even find you under a microscope. — Andrea Dworkin

You can decide to forgo any ethical deliberations and simply embrace the moral beliefs and norms you inherited from your family and culture. But this approach undermines your freedom, for if you accept without question whatever moral beliefs come your way, they are not really yours. Only if you critically examine them for yourself are they truly yours. — Lewis Vaughn

Trust is a fragile thing. Once earned, it affords us tremendous freedom. But once trust is lost, it can be impossible to recover. Of course the truth is, we never know who we can trust. Those we're closest to can betray us, and total strangers can come to our rescue. In the end, most people decide to trust only themselves. It really is the simplest way to keep from getting burned. — Mary Alice

If you decide to be with a person, don't try to change anything about her. Just like your dog or your cat, let her be who she is. She has the right to be who she is; she has a right to be free. When you inhibit your partner's freedom, you inhibit your own because you have to be there to see what your partner is doing or not doing. And if you love yourself so much, you are never going to give up your personal freedom. Can — Miguel Ruiz

My world falls apart, crumbles, "The centre cannot hold." There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom - I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go. — Sylvia Plath

My freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide, moreover, without appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself. — Gabriel Marcel

A year ago Guyana became politically free and independent. She assumed the untrammeled right to make her own decisions on what ought to be done or ought not to be done within her border. Since then, hers has also been the right to decide what course she would take and to state her views and opinions positively in the fora of the world. As we celebrate the first anniversary of freedom, it is our duty to take account of what we have achieved or what we have failed to do, to note where we have done well and what we ought to have done better. — Forbes Burnham

you're wrong, you will suffer for it. If you're right, you will find happiness. You have to be the one to decide. "Who are you to know?" It's your future at stake. You have to know. Freedom comes only from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue. - David Seabury — Harry Browne

I joined the Labour party because I believed in equality, in freedom of speech and in tolerance, compassion and understanding for people, irrespective of their background and views. In whatever I decide to do in the future I will hold to those principles. — Geoff Hoon

If this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends. — Guy Gavriel Kay

It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom? — Victoria Woodhull

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. — Napoleon Bonaparte

A growing number of young women who have the freedom to decide have decided that career can wait, and the delicious early years of their children's lives can't. — Suzanne Fields

We always have a choice. Only you can decide what you become. — Seth Adam Smith

At the same time he could hardly believe what he had been reading. It struck him as verging on madness. This wild confession, this owing to a crime so outlandish, so totally different from the true ones of mating and theft of the negroes, outraged him with its insolence and perversity. In the conflict of these feelings Erasmus was swept by doubt and loneliness. His whole being seemed under threat of dissolution. What became of law, of legitimacy, of established order, if a man could assume such attitudes of private morality, decide for himself where his fault lay? It turned everything upside down. He could think of nothing more damnable. And yet ... He remembered suddenly the second, rarer smile his cousin had, the one that came slowly, transforming his face. Briefly, unwillingly, Erasmus glimpsed the possibility of freedom. — Barry Unsworth

Freedom is uncertain, because it is up to you to decide. — Adam Vether

In the world of dogma, you become free the day you decide to go to hell. — Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel

The fairy had flown over to the window and was peering curiously out at the alley.
"Forget it. Stay here," said Dustfinger. "Please. Believe me, it's no place for you out there."
She looked at him quizzically, then folded her wings and knelt on the windowsill. And there she stayed, as if she coudln't decide between the hot room and the strange freedom to be found outside. — Cornelia Funke

Before he had come to the town he had known about nothing but death: here he had learnt to live, to decide things for himself; he had learnt what it felt like to wash in clean water in the sunshine until he was clean himself, and what it felt like to satisfy his hunger with food that tasted good; he had learnt the sound of laughter that was free from cruelty; he had learnt the meaning of beauty — Anne Holm

Defenders of the prosecution seem to think that anyone charged with a felony must somehow deserve punishment. That idea can only be sustained without actual exposure to the legal system. Yes, most of the time prosecutors do chase actual wrongdoers, but today our criminal laws are so expansive that most people of any vigor and spirit can be found to violate them in some way. Basically, under American law, anyone interesting is a felon. The prosecutors, not the law, decide who deserves punishment.

Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. — Tim Wu

The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness. We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about. To live for happiness means that you are trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living. But to "live for meaning" means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us. In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness.129 — Timothy Keller

I am not against rules, but the rules should arise out of your understanding. They should not be imposed from the outside. I am not against discipline! but discipline should not be slavery. All true discipline is self-discipline. And self-discipline is never against freedom - in fact, it is the ladder to freedom. Only disciplined people become free, but their discipline is not obedience to others: their discipline is obedience to their own inner voice. And they are ready to risk anything for it. Let your own awareness decide your lifestyle, life pattern. Don't allow anybody else to decide it. That is a sin, to allow anybody else to decide it. Why is it a sin? Because you will never be in your life. It will remain superficial, it will be hypocrisy. — Osho

When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the 'charms of music and female chit-chat.' Against marriage he listed the 'terrible loss of time,' lack of freedom to go where he wished, the burden of visiting relatives, the expense and anxiety provoked by children, the concern that 'perhaps my wife won't like London,' and having less money to spend on books. Weighing one column against the other produced a narrow margin of victory, and at the bottom Darwin scrawled, 'Marry - Marry - Marry Q.E.D.' Quod erat demonstrandum, the mathematical sign-off that Darwin himself restated in English: 'It being proved necessary to Marry. — Brian Christian

Only the individual can decide what level of risk she can tolerate and what level of freedom she's willing to sacrifice for the sake of safety. — Park Dietz

Seemed like the flaw in life, that God had given men the freedom to do good or evil. And yet that freedom, a true free will, was at the heart of what he believed about life. Driven by love, God had created people with a free will, had given people the freedom to decide what they wanted to do, so God could know who wanted to freely love Him back. Most people rejected God and the world turned evil. But in the midst of that, God was still good, He still acted in love in every situation. — Dee Henderson

You need to decide what you want for yourself. You want to go home? There's a price. You want control over your life? There's a price. You want the freedom to say no? There's a price. There's always a price. — Patrick Rothfuss

You have the freedom and the ability to decide what to do with your life, and that includes learning how to welcome happiness again. It's a conscious choice we each have to make, to emerge from the embers of profound loss and hopelessness, to become the fire that warms us, lights our path, all of it. We can embody that warmth and light. — Becca Vry

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. — Margaret Sanger

The river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we. For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom in the sea. — Aldo Leopold

It takes courage to sit on a jury. How many of us want to decide the fate of another person's life or freedom? How many of us want to hold that kind of power in our hands? — Regina Brett

Bootstrapping allows you total creative freedom. For example, if you decide to approach your business in a certain way that makes it a two- or three-year process to get to your first product, you can do that, versus being rushed into it by investors. — Nick Woodman

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Decide yourself who was right: you or the one who questioned you then? Recall the first question; its meaning, though not literally, was this: 'You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend, which they dread and fear - for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The First Amendment guarantees liberty of human expression in order to preserve in our Nation what Mr. Justice Holmes called a "free trade in ideas." To that end, the Constitution protects more than just a man's freedom to say or write or publish what he wants. It secures as well the liberty of each man to decide for himself what he will read and to what he will listen. The Constitution guarantees, in short, a society of free choice. — Potter Stewart

Today, you can decide to walk in freedom. You can choose to walk differently. You can walk as a free person, enjoying every step. — Nhat Hanh

If you are going to experience the joy of your freedom in Christ, you have to decide whether you will please God or people. — Jerry Bridges

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none. — Virginia Woolf

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking. — David Byrne

He was back at the point of departure, at the place that filled writers with dread and excitement, for this was where they must decide which new story to tackle of the many floating in the air, which plot to bind themselves to for a lengthy period; and they had to choose carefully, study each option calmly ... because there were dangerous stories, stories that resisted being inhabited, and stories that pulled you apart while you were writing them ... At that moment, before reverently committing the first word to paper, he could write anything he wanted, and this fired his blood with a powerful sense of freedom, as wonderful as it was fleeting, for he knew it would vanish the moment he chose one story and sacrificed all the others. — Felix J. Palma

Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Mennonites formed themselves in Holland five hundred years ago after a man named Menno Simons became so moved by hearing Anabaptist prisoners singing hymns before being executed by the Spanish Inquisition that he joined their cause and became their leader. Then they started to move all around the world in colonies looking for freedom and isolation and peace and opportunities to sell cheese. Different countries give us shelter if we agree to stay out of trouble and help with the economy by farming in obscurity. We live like ghosts. Then, sometimes, those countries decide they want us to be real citizens after all and start to force us to do things like join the army or pay taxes or respect laws and then we pack our stuff up in the middle of the night and move to another country where we can live purely but somewhat out of context. — Miriam Toews

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion. — Willa Cather

Angelo was a grown man, and here was one thing he was quite free to decide for himself, and yet he was ready to let others make up his mind for him ... that could only be stupidity. — Anne Holm

Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. — Paul Robeson

Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community. — Lauren Groff

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind's ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. — Neel Burton

If man conceptually gives people the freedom to make their own choices (without transgressing the limits of their own boundaries into the domains of the others) alongside leaving them to decide the adequate paces of these journeys, then she/he can guarantee the threads of this methodology to eventually converge at The Lord's Law. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

If the true freedom of the press is to decide for itself what to publish and when to publish it, the true responsibility of the press must be to assert and defend that freedom ... What the press in America needs is less inhibition, not more restraint. — Tom Wicker

If we are not even free anymore to decide something as basic as what we wish to eat or drink, how much freedom do we really have left? — Ron Paul