Youth And Freedom Quotes & Sayings

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own. — Margaret Atwood

Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life. — Isaac Watts

That the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and country. — Thomas Jefferson

I once had a mind of quicksand,
That dragged ideas into its depths,
Inhaling specks of sunlight,
Every time I drew a breath,
But the world thought me a hazard,
When every word I spoke, I meant,
So around me they put caution tape,
And filled me with cement. — Erin Hanson

Youth, health and freedom were meant to be enjoyed and I want to try every pleasure before I am too old to enjoy them. — Louisa May Alcott

Sensible of the importance of Christian piety and virtue to the order and happiness of a state, I cannot but earnestly commend to you every measure for their support and encouragement ... Manners, by which not only the freedom, but the very existence of the republics, are greatly affected, depend much upon the public institutions of religion and the good education of youth; in both these instances our fathers laid wise foundations, for which their posterity have had reason to bless their memory. — John Hancock

For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. I — Plato

Every civil government is based upon some religion or philosophy of life. Education in a nation will propagate the religion of that nation. In America, the foundational religion was Christianity. And it was sown in the hearts of Americans through the home and private and public schools for centuries. Our liberty, growth, and prosperity was the result of a Biblical philosophy of life. Our continued freedom and success is dependent on our educating the youth of America in the principles of Christianity. — Noah Webster

I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense... Schopenhauer's saying, 'A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,' has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life's hardships, my own and others', and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due. — Albert Einstein

Old age is the most precious time of life, the one nearest eternity. There are two ways of growing old. There are old people who are anxious and bitter, living in the past and illusion, who criticize everything that goes on around them. Young people are repulsed by them; they are shut away in their sadness and loneliness, shriveled up in themselves. But there are also old people with a child's heart, who have used their freedom from function and responsibility to find a new youth. They have the wonder of a child, but the wisdom of maturity as well. They have integrated their years of activity and so can live without being attached to power. Their freedom of heart and their acceptance of their limitations and weakness makes them people whose radiance illuminates the whole community. They are gentle and merciful, symbols of compassion and forgiveness. They become a community's hidden treasures, sources of unity and life. They are true contemplatives at the heart of community. — Jean Vanier

Hitherto I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or perhaps an architect. Now this was no longer the case. Now he aspired to something higher, which I could not yet fully grasp. It rather surprised me, as I thought that the vocation of the artist was for him the highest, most desirable goal. But now he was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.
It was an unknown youth who spoke to me in that strange hour. He spoke of a special mission which one day would be entrusted to him, and I, his only listener, could hardly understand what he meant. Many years had to pass before I realized the significance of this enraptured hour for my friend. — August Kubizek

O, Youth: Do you know that yours is not the first generation to yearn for a life full of beauty and freedom? — Albert Einstein

Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, andamong youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice ... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear. — Anton Chekhov

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the future. He simply calls it the American way of life and does not give serious thought to the question of what made this continuous improvement in the supply of material goods possible. — Ludwig Von Mises

Winter Liar by Liam Doyle the Incubus
What come once here will never come again,
no matter monument nor memory;
all sunwarmed green succumbs to winter's wind.
And you, my love, were also my best friend,
and had your life to live. The tragedy
was not just my youth's recklessness, although
I trusted much to impulse, whim, freedom,
a destiny excluding doom. Frankly,
youth can be our insanity. But now I'm cured
of that fever, although the price was high;
and chilly April wind can only sigh
at my regrets, yet sun will brighten wind so,
one knows that soon green stirs, and wild bees hum.
And summer once more will make winter liar,
but I won't warm. You're all I'll ever desire. — Juliet Dark

VW has held a beloved place in American culture. When I graduated from college, many of my friends drove across the country, and most hit the road in a VW van or Bug. Through the years, these cars have represented youth, freedom and quirkiness. — Frances Beinecke

As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man's free agency is a God-given gift. In sensing our responsibility to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity, let students and patriotic people ever keep in mind the warning voice of James Russell Lowell proclaiming: 'Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.'
There is a crying need today to have this truth heralded throughout the land that youth especially may appreciate and hold the freedom of the individual as sacred as did our revolutionary fathers — David O. McKay

The volunteers merely dropped in for a summer, then went home to question America. Some would spearhead the events that defined the 1960s - the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement. Others, spreading ideals absorbed in Mississippi, would be forever skeptical of authority, forever democrats with a small d, and forever touched by this single season of their youth. But first, they had to survive Freedom Summer. — Bruce Watson

A magnificient life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away. It is waiting like the cake is waiting when there's butter, milk, flour and sugar. This is the realm of freedom. It is an empty realm. Here man's maginificent power over nature has left him alone with himself, powerless. It is the boredom of youth without a future. — Henri Lefebvre

As a very young person, I was ready and willing to explore and try new things, unhampered by the daily routines that adults so often feel obligated to adhere to. — K. Martin Beckner

Of late there has been a new spirit manifested in the youth which is growing up with the depression. This spirit is more purposeful though still confused. It wants to create a new world, but is not clear as to how it wants to go about it. For that reason the young generation asks for saviors. It tends to believe in dictators and to hail each new aspirant for that honor as a messiah. It wants cut and dried systems of salvation with a wise minority to direct society on some one-way road to utopia. It has not yet realized that it must save itself. The young generation has not yet learned that the problems confronting them can be solved only by themselves and will have to be settled on the basis of social and economic freedom in co-operation with the struggling masses for the right to the table and joy of life. — Emma Goldman

Youth. Murder (Biko). Slavery. Freedom. We are all creatures of ignorance at the end of the day. The natural order of the hierarchy of life states that we are creatures. Creatures of habit whether it is normal (following the status quo and all of that jazz). Creatures of marching orders and almost sanitary routine. Creatures of the abnormal. Our leaders are coldly obliterating the past. It is impossible to destroy nations, tribes, individuals without their permission. Many lessons learned from the past come to life like the connect the dots game of a child in a museum. We are swift to forget history. Bury the past like yesterday's newspaper, our infirm and elderly in nursing homes. — Abigail George

He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he'd been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He'd thought it a mistake to choose so early in life and embrace the present good. He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time. ("Old Haunts") — Richard Matheson

Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having the openness and exuberance of youth, while a tyrant counts this a danger, and seeks to slay or silence those possessed of spirit, while the discreet fear his power and violence. — Euripides

Youth, elastic and bright, disdains to be compelled. When conquered, from its very chains it forges implements for freedom; it alights from one baffled flight, only again to soar on untired wing towards some other aim. Previous defeat is made the bridge to pass the tide to another shore; and, if that break down, its fragments become stepping stones. It will feed upon despair, and call it a medicine which is to renovate its dying hopes. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

He chose for his hero a youth nourished in dreams of liberty, some of whose actions are in direct opposition to the opinions of the world, but who is animated throughout by an ardent love of virtue, and a resolution to confer the boons of political and intellectual freedom on his fellow-creatures.
On Percy Shelley's The Revolt of Islam — Mary Shelley

You may be safe, but I am free.' Take advantage of the freedom that comes with your youth. Inhale life, exhale fire, and embrace the late, sleepless nights, because that's when the magic happens- when everyone else is asleep and you're awake thinking about the world as it is, and the world as it would be. Make the most of those moments," I said forcefully. "And in the coming years people will tell you that you're too young to change the world. I'm here to tell you, that's fucking bullshit. — Adam Braun

But we didn't, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn't see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love - because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter? - we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn't, we didn't, we never did. — Stuart Dybek

The younger generation is essentially idealistic. This applies to the Iranian youth as well. In addition, the youth in Iran face certain difficulties ... the Iranian youth need more freedom. They are struggling for more freedom and democracy. This commands great respect. — Shirin Ebadi

Lynching's legacy, though, is also evident today in law enforcement's freedom from accountability in the shooting of black and other youth of color, thus displaying a de facto, and often actual, legalization of white supremacist killing of black life. — Mark Lewis Taylor

Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

To .. all the dispossessed youth of Africa: for perpetuation of communion with ancestral spirits through the fight for African freedom, and in the firm faith that the dead, the living, and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines. — Jomo Kenyatta

(To The Youth) ... you know and everybody knows that life has failed to bring the light of hope to my eyes, draw a smile on my face, and create joy in my heart. You know and everybody knows that being tortured for you, being imprisoned for you and suffering for your sake has been the only joy I have ever had ... it is from your joy that I feel comfort, it is your freedom that brings the light of hope to my sight, it is your comfort that I feel relaxed in my heart ... I cannot speak well or write well ... please note the hidden force under my simple lousy words.. please understand ... please understand ! I love you and consider you my only friend; all my life, all the days and nights, every moment of my life is a witness to my love and dedication for you. Your freedom is my doctrine, your success is my affection, your future is my only hope! — Ali Shariati

Smiling is not a duty, but a freedom. It's up to you now; you are liberated from the expectations and conformities of youth. — Justine Picardie

People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don't believe in making a living. That it's a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in making a life and money is a distracting object if there's anything left at the end of the day and I just want to go on well. Make it through the day. So I smile and raise my glass and they laugh and take my hand, saying "here's to the youth", pointing at me. And I might just be young
and naive
for I still believe in the freedom of choice
of how to spend your life.
So they toast to the youth, who still think she's free,
and that's all fine by me. — Charlotte Eriksson

Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom. Aristotle speaks plainly to this purpose, saying, 'that the institution of youth should be accommodated to that form of government under which they live; forasmuch as it makes exceedingly for the preservation of the present government, whatsoever it be. — John Adams

Hong Kong is not just a global financial center. It's also a place with a lot of teens and youth who love freedom, democracy, and human rights. — Joshua Wong

In America, immigration is the story of hope and achievement, of youth, of freedom, of creation. But all entrances on one stage are exits elsewhere. — A.A. Gill

Breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. — Sinclair Lewis

Italy. 'I must use my freedom while I feel so much strength and youth in me,' he said to himself. 'Pierre was right when he said we must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while there is life we must live and be happy!' thought he. — Leo Tolstoy

We're constantly told that running will ruin our knees and outrage our hearts, but for nearly all of human existence, it was associated with freedom, vitality, and eternal youth. — Christopher McDougall

We, as artists, we have the right to express ourselves. That is our first amendment, freedom of speech. But I also believe that we have an obligation to the youth to be somewhat responsible in what we say on records. But I think that comes with age. I think that comes with artists growing up and becoming assured of who they are as people. — Ja Rule

And should I not, had I but known, have flung the machine this way and that, once more to feel it live under my hand, have sported in the sky and laughed and sung, knowing that never after should I feel so free, so sure in hazard, so secure, riding the daylight in the pride of youth? No more horizons wider than Hope! No more the franchise of the sky, the freedom of the blue! No more! Farewell to wings! Down to the little earth! — Cecil Arthur Lewis

was not death for which she grieved, but life, life which had carved his mouth into such sorrow and had set hollows underneath his eyes, which had given him dreams of love in his youth and then had robbed him, had given him dreams in his age of free islands in a blue and tropic sea and had held him locked in a drab house in a little town. And as cruel as anything was death, which revealed him like this, when he was helpless any longer to hide that which alive he had hidden. She went away crying most passionately to her heart, "We ought all to be free. Everybody ought to be free for himself, somehow. No one ought to come to death and never have known what freedom is." When — Pearl S. Buck

What is freedom?
Is it moving through a room unhindered, in any direction you want, fast or slow? Or is it being able to think any thought whatsoever, high or low, without shame or fear? Is freedom being able to openly express your convictions, and then trying to influence others to think the same thing? Or is freedom having the possibility to choose, being able to say no to what you don't want?
[...]
Freedom, thought Phillip Mouse, would be to outwit the limitations fate had once given him. To break out of the social, intellectual, and emotional framework that the factory [birthplace] and his youth had defined.
Freedom, thought Mouse, was to surprise life by placing yourself above your fate. — Tim Davys

Why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel). And London. And freedom. But stop. You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we diagnose our friends' diseases. "Do not, in your affluence and plenty," you seem to say, "pass me by." "Stop," you say. "Ask me what I suffer. — Virginia Woolf

The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth. — Simone Weil

It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap. — Alexis De Tocqueville

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order. — Will Durant

Muse

When at night I wait for her to come,
Life, it seems, hangs by a single strand.
What are glory, youth, freedom, in comparison
with the dear welcome guest, a flute in hand?

She enters now. Pushing her veil aside,
she stares through me with her attentiveness.
I question her: 'And were you Dante's guide,
dictating the Inferno?' She answers: 'Yes. — Anna Akhmatova

Laughter is taken as a sign of strength, freedom, health, beauty, youth, and happiness. — Martin Grotjahn

The year that Rutherford died (1938) there disappeared forever the happy days of free scientific work which gave us such delight in our youth. Science has lost her freedom. Science has become a productive force. She has become rich but she has become enslaved and part of her is veiled in secrecy. I do not know whether Rutherford would continue to joke and laugh as he used to. — Pyotr Kapitsa

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

A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death.. — Anton Chekhov

Free a man of the constraints that limit and inhibit his development, and you have a free human being. Freedom is the natural state of man." He looked away from the boy for a moment and recalled his youth, his own search for self. "My boy," he imparted with a ferocious passion that shook them both by the throat, "there is nothing negative about our human potential - do you understand me? God Himself created you the way you are. Do not let anyone in this world convince you otherwise. And you are capable of anything, my boy. There is and shall always be a disparity among the gifts God has granted men, but we all deserve equal consideration. All men, no matter how low, how basic, or how tormented, deserve compassion, dignified brotherhood, and respect.
"But part of respecting all men is respecting ourselves. Recognizing that God has blessed you. By embracing these gifts, we live as God lives, with love for all He has created - with an open heart. — Alexandra Silber

What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? — Robert McCammon

This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful 'expert' that we ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as possible alternatives. Don't these good people realize that they are reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity? — Reinhold Niebuhr

We screamed this primeval scream built on a base of freedom, raised from beauty of a dying breed, and threw our heads back to laugh or cry, I'm not entirely sure which. But the scream shook the golden sunset, bringing it to its knees. — Taylor Rhodes

I declare it well befits me to thank our God for simpler pleasures than these, than teak or gold or India cloth. Daily, in my youth, should not I have fallen upon my knees and thanked Him who died for us upon the Cross for the warmth of kindled fires, for the freedom to swing my hands in the air? Should I not have praised Him for the liberty to open doors and pass through them, for the escape from drudgery, and most, my mother's hand to hold? — M T Anderson

On the boardwalk the arcade jukebox plays all night surrounded by teenagers
sometimes twenty bodies deep, bare-skinned and full of energy for the music, for one another, for life, for the little bit of freedom they taste in the salt air and their skin. My father finds his place in this crowd. They are a force together. They don't do drugs. They don't drink. But they do music, and their power comes from their numbers and the thrill of being young on the beach at night. — Laura Schenone

The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem. — May Swenson

It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age. — James Mackintosh

In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny. — Ruth Ozeki

The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often,
a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose
in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;
chose "Angel Band" by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar,
ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks.
We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginia
knocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea.
No one asked why he was so solemn today.
It was warm. It was relatively quiet.
To anyone else, this place could feel sinister.
But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place.
No one was ever here long enough to know us.
And we liked it that way. — Taylor Rhodes

Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom. — Nelson Mandela

To her audience, Janis Joplin has remained a symbol, artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability, but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours. — Jon Landau