Freedom 20

I hated slavery, always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to fan it into a blaze, at any moment. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past troubled me, and I longed to have a future--a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul--whose life and happiness is unceasing progress--what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. I was now not only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to seem to be contented.FREDERICK DOUGLASS, My Bondage and My Freedom
Proving one's freedom will often mean insisting on the most arbitrary, odd, unrepeatable aspects of one's behavior.ERMANNO BENCIVENGA, Freedom: A Dialogue
Without total freedom, every perception, every objective regard, is twisted. It is only the man who is totally free who can look and understand immediately. Freedom implies really, doesn't it, the total emptying of the mind. Completely to empty the whole content of the mind--that is real freedom. Freedom is not mere revolt from circumstances, which again breeds other circumstances, other environmental influences, which enslave the mind. We are talking about a freedom that comes naturally, easily, unasked for, when the mind is capable of functioning at its highest level.JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI, On Freedom
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator
The free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.LEON BLUM, quoted in Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases
The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the...