Illusion Of Freedom Quotes

It is just an illusion of freedom. We are, perhaps, as free as a railway carriage. ~ Venugopal Gupta

Rather than having actual freedom, it seemed that, like animals in a habitat in the zoo, we had only the illusion of freedom. As long as we didn't try to leave the cage, we'd never know we weren't actually free. ~ Neil Strauss

There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair. ~ Octavia E. Butler

In a revolution of consciousness the windows slowly become mirrors. We will see that there was only an illusion of freedom and at the same time we are forced to look at ourselves and contemplate the consequences of our own actions. ~ Freequill

I believe it was Napoleon who first sensed the ease with which, in modern society, the illusion of freedom can be created by strategic relaxation of regulations and law on individual thought, provided it is only individual, while all the time fundamental economic and political liberties are being circumscribed. The barriers to the kind of power Napoleon wielded as emperor are not individual rights so much as the kinds of rights associated with autonomy of local community, voluntary association, political party. These are the real measure of the degree to which central political power is limited in a society. Neither centralization nor bureaucratized collectivism can thrive as long as there is a substantial body of local authorities to check them ~ Robert A. Nisbet

You wish to be free, but there is no such thing as freedom. You can redecorate dungeon to give illusion of freedom, but you are still in dungeon." "I should've had the choice." "Choice is illusion, same as happiness and freedom. ~ Carolyn Crane

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno . ~ Italo Svevo

The illusion of freedom is just another sort of prison- ~ Lisa Mantchev

Free zero-point energy doesn't exist in an illusion of freedom. ~ Toba Beta

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in. ~ Oliver Sacks

Perhaps, there is no such person who can be called truly free, but only those who can be deemed so by comparison. ~ Ashim Shanker

Students of public speaking continually ask, "How can I overcome
self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an
audience?"
Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some
horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the
thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a
farmer's wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as
the train goes by?
How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars - graze him in a
back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or
automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see
the machines?
Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and
fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain
freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give
you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the
water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle
and be "half scared to death." There are a great many "wetless"
bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim
in them. To plunge is the only way. ~ Dale Carnegie

No subject was more important in the 2014 elections than healthcare, and Republicans in Congress should waste no time in taking decisive action in response to the voters'€ demands. Obamacare has escalated costs, disrupted coverage, and introduced bad incentives throughout our healthcare system. Congress must repeal Obamacare and send the president a replacement package of reforms that protects freedom and focuses on the real problem with American healthcare -€" affordability. ~ Bobby Jindal

That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music. ~ Alvin Lee

There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One's values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one's daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

He traced the constellations as they slid their way across the roof of the world from dusk till dawn. The precision of it, the quiet orderliness of the stars, gave him a sense of freedom. There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth. Given enough time, their memory would close over his life like healing a wound. All would be forgotten, all suffering erased. ~ M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." ~ Eric Hoffer

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. ~ Henry Adams

I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves. ~ Gloria Steinem

For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slaveholders extolling a gospel of freedom... Conveniently, it holds the possibility of ultimate resolution, for if right-thinking individuals can dedicate themselves to finishing the work of ensuring freedom for all, then perhaps the ghosts of history can be escaped. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Marriage is going to disappear, should disappear. And now the point is coming in the history of humanity where it becomes possible that marriage can disappear. It is already an outmoded phenomenon, it has lived too long and it has created nothing but misery. Marriage should disappear and love should flower again. One should live with insecurity and freedom. That I call intelligence. ~ Rajneesh

True freedom exists beyond the bounds of our faculty of reason because rational beings can only reason practical freedoms even if first conceived in theory or as an idea. ~ Adam Kovacevic

Women have greater freedom than ever before, and yet it is not clear whether that freedom has given us greater access to true love. It is not clear how that freedom has changed the nature of romance and partnerships. ~ Bell Hooks

He was aware of the irony that he who prized his freedom and willingness to seek the truth had been happiest when he had a defined purpose, a sense of duty and obligation, and a specific destination in mind. ~ John Lanchester

I have always been a firm believer in the longstanding American principle of having the right to bear arms and I will remain committed to see that this freedom is not infringed upon, revoked, or limited in any way. ~ Jeff Miller

Enlightenment always tastes of freedom. ~ Martha N. Beck

This penetrating vocabulary of "initiatory acts," "the infectiousness of the unconflicted person," "priority magic," and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that "father permits it" or "orders it." It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion. ~ Ernest Becker

Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn't look out, they would make us live in cages too.
So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put your fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares.
Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn't do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren't happy and didn't feel free. You made all the cages, the you wondered why you didn't feel free. ~ Kent Nerburn

Freedom which has genuine meaning is more than a timeless abstraction, more than an absence of restraints. ~ Helen Lynd

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom. ~ Lord Acton

The passions of the titanic struggle will finally enter upon the sleep of oblivion, and only its splendid accomplishments for the cause of human freedom and a united nation, stronger and richer in patriotism because of the great strife, will be remembered. ~ James Longstreet

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. ~ Toni Morrison

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in which Wordsworth discusses the theories of poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and Coleridge's contemporaries. The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of the age. The movement towards greater freedom and democracy in political and social affairs is paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the existing regime and establish a new, more 'democratic' poetic order. To do this, the writers used 'the real language of men' (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and even, in the case of Byron and Shelley, got directly involved in political activities themselves.

The Romantic age in literature is often contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which preceded it. The comparison is valuable, for it is not simply two different attitudes to literature which are being compared but two different ways of seeing and experiencing life.

The Classical or Augustan age of the early and mid-eighteenth century stressed the importance of reason and order. Strong feelings and flights of the imagination had to be controlled (although they were obviously found widely, especially in poetry). The swift improvements in medicine, economics, science and engineering, together with rapid developments in both agricultural and industrial t ~ Ronald Carter

The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras, but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realise that they are already trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within a bigger box – human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Everyone asks for freedom for himself,
The man free love, the businessman free trade,
The writer and talker free speech and free press. ~ Robert Frost

I'd read up on the history of our country and I'd become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries. ~ John Wayne

The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialist promise us, and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice: it must be the freedom of economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

recent events compel us to raise anew. From the beginning, the
most serious and systematic attempts to write Universal Histories saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom. History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end. ~ Francis Fukuyama

The strength of a movement also relied on participation. Nonviolent campaigns succeeded or failed by the numbers of people willing to get in the way of injustice, or withdraw support from tyrants, or put their hands on the freedom plow and sow the seeds of change. ~ Rivera Sun

When I went off to the army when I was 17 years old, I believed in America and the rights of freedom. But today I believe my government is lying to the American people and that my president, George Bush, is a criminal. ~ Jack Herer

I live here. I work here. Why would I have an issue with America? This is the only country that gives you freedom - freedom of religion, freedom of choice. You don't get that elsewhere. Nobody wants to leave America. People die to come here. ~ Najibullah Zazi