All Quotes By Tag: Freedom

“The journey through another world, beyond bad dreamsbeyond the memories of a murdered generation,cartographed in captivity by bare survivorsmakes sacristans of us all.The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.Be careful, they say, don’t hock the beads of kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymnsupon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voicetransforms the ways of song to words of poetry or proseand makes distinctionsno one recognizes.Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscanson the edge of useless law; we prayto the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistlein ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chainof incense burners. Migration makes new citizens of Rome.”

“Destroy what you have become and become what you did destroy/”

“If a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission.”

“You can give illness to her body but you can’t take the gypsy out of that girl.”

“The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.”

“But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace – the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors – makes all infirmities occasions of glory.”

“Just a grain can bring a bird down from the skies.Hindi/ Urdu Translation:Ek dana bhar hi chidiya ko zameeN par la sakta hai.”

“If [you’re asked] what you think, tell. If you have a preference, voice it. If you have a question, ask it. If you want to cry, bawl. If you need help, raise your hand and jump up and down.”

“I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. We need men like him today more than ever. His writing still inspires us and challenges the ‘better angels’ of our nature, when people open their hearts and minds to his simple, honest humanity. Thank goodness he was here.”

“To be successful, one has to be one of three bees – the queen bee, the hardest working bee, or the bee that does not fit in.”

“If it means my death, I don’t care, because even death will be a sort of freedom.”

“(about William Blake)[Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and “imaginative death.”And what we so often call “reason” and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. “It won’t pay.” “People will think it is silly.” “No one else does it.” “It is immoral.”But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”For this “Reason” as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. “For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things.” And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against “mere enthusiasm,” Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): “Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!”

“Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting–or even demanding–their own enslavement.”

“Don’t you miss it?” I say. “Being free.”He laughs.”

“My reasons to liveWere my reasons to dieBut at least they were mineNow I’ve freedom unboundCut the laces of life”