Liberation And Awakenings Quotes

Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors. ~ Carl Sagan

When great depths of unrelenting sorrow are punctuated by great peaks of joy and liberation, the result is delicious. ~ Georges St-Pierre

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives. ~ Terence McKenna

If you are not for us, then you are against us! One day we will be living alongside you in those mansions. Your choice. Share or lose it all. We're going to take Africa away from its colonial masters. Step aside gracefully, we'll let you stay. Fight us and we'll drive you out. ~ Richard H. Mcbee Jr.

Each of us has a heart, a soul, and feelings. Each of us desires to be wanted, to be appreciated, and to be loved. The enchantment in life is to discover and spend time with another person who knows that and expresses it. In this context, the liberation of our naked bodies in the act of lovemaking is what gives us ultimate pleasure. ~ J.F. Kelly

Liberation also means that even though I'm a woman I have masculine parts of my temperament which I can safely explore and integrate into my experience. ~ Marianne Williamson

There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project. ~ Stan Goff

Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality. ~ Paulo Freire

In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left. ~ Marisha Pessl

No other drug can compete with cannabis for its ability to satisfy the innate yearnings for Archaic boundary dissolution and yet leave intact the structures of ordinary society. If every alcoholic were a pothead, if every crack user were a pothead, if every smoker smoked only cannabis, the social consequences of the 'drug problem' would be transformed. Yet, as a society we are not ready to discuss the possibility of self-managed addictions and the possibility of intelligently choosing the plants we ally ourselves to. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, this will come. ~ Terence McKenna

Carrie, Sheila, Sandy, Michael, my beloved husband and my family…I have been in a place for six incredible years where winning meant a crust of bread and to live another day. Since the blessed day of my liberation I have asked the question, 'Why am I here? I am no better.' In my mind's eye I see those years and faces of those who never lived to see the magic of a boring evening at home. On their behalf I wish to thank you for honoring their memory, and you cannot do that in a better way than when you return to your homes tonight to realize that each of you who knows the joy of freedom are winners. Thank you on their behalf with all my heart. ~ Gerda Weissmann Klein

One of the great creations of Mexican Catholicism was the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a Mexican Indian, on the same hill where, before the Conquest, a pre-Hispanic goddess had been worshiped. Catholicism was able to take root in Mexico by transforming the ancient gods into the saints, virgins, and devils of the new religion. Nothing similar could occur in India with Muslim monotheism or Protestant Christianity, both of which saw the cult of images, of saints and virgins, as idolatry. The Christianity imported by the British was poor in rites and ceremonies, but full of moral and sexual rigidity. In other words: the exact opposite of popular Hinduism. Similarly, in Christian asceticism, the central concept is redemption; in India, it is liberation. These two words encompass opposite ideas of this world and the next, of the body and the soul. ~ Octavio Paz

For true liberation, you do not need to fight. You simply have to change your thoughts and drift away from conformity, comfort, security, and certainty of life and embrace and enjoy the possibilities and magnificence of the uncertainty of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

I became aware that there was no barrier between what was inside and what was outside. My body was illuminated by a bright light. I heard with my eyes and saw with my ears. I used my nose as mouth and my mouth as nose. I experienced the world with the totality of my senses as my spirit gathered and my form dissolved. There was no distinction between muscles and bones. My body stopped being heavy and I felt like a floating leaf. Without knowing it, I was being carried by the wind. Drifting here and there, I did not know whether I rode on the wind or the wind rode on me. ~ Liezi

All liberation affects Good and Evil equally. The liberation of morals and minds entails crimes and catastrophes. The liberation of law and pleasure leads inevitably to the liberation of crime. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Women's liberation fought for the right of women to leave the home and become involved in the public sphere; feminists now want to convert this realm into a series of safe spaces and censored zones. If you don't like what someone says to you on the street, say something back, put your headphones on, or just laugh – it's really not that bad. ~ Ella Whelan

Yet while it may be true that religious zeal can inspire armies better than most secular incentives, there was another great awakening that occurred before and during the Revolutionary era that also played a role. The other great awakening was a reevaluation of the merits of doubt. Often unspoken, religious skepticism in the colonial era was taboo even among professed radicals. Yet the spiritual awakenings of the middle of the eighteenth century signaled a transformation of "unbelief" from presumed moral failing to a reasonable theological and political position. ~ Peter Manseau

If we look at it more from a philosophical standpoint, these foundations of atheism and secular humanism believe that you are your own God. That leads us to something that unfortunately has crept into many churches across America, and it is what I call the Social Gospel. The social gospel, that could creep into something that is called Liberation Theology, which is a mixture of leftist, pseudo-Christianity with Marxism. ~ Ted Cruz

When will final Liberation [Moksha] occur?! It is when your knowledge, your understanding [darshan] becomes mistake-free. You have been stuck because of these mistakes. One says, 'I am Chandulal. I am the husband of this woman. I am this boy's father. I am eighty years old'. So many such mistakes are there! There is a series of such mistakes!! Mistake is indeed at the root of all that!!! 'This' is the only misunderstanding' there is, and that is what has obstructed liberation. And through only one understanding there is liberation. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story. ~ Patrick Ness

What I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself of all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake myself free of these accumulating experiences which were mine only by force of inertia required a violent effort. Now and then I lunged and tore at the net, but only to become more enmeshed. My liberation seemed to involve pain and suffering to those near and dear to me. Every move I made for my own private good brought about reproach and condemnation. I was a traitor a thousand times over. ~ Henry Miller

This is an illustrious example which reminds us that good and saintly men sometimes run into the greatest of misfortunes and dangers not through their own but by someone else's fault. To the others, indeed, who are involved in the same danger no way of salvation or liberation appears, but they think that all is lost. But because there are some godly men, or only one godly man, in the same ship, the ship must reach port safe and sound, however much it has been tossed about by a heavy storm, even though a thousand devils have been fighting in opposition and causing tumult in the same ship. ~ Martin Luther

When I was in high school, it was the beginning of hippies and free love and sleeping with people was a sign of your liberation and your freedom. Then we [had to worry about] AIDS, so they started lecturing my kids in elementary school about safe sex. Sex turned from something joyful into something kind of dangerous, and it was hard to avoid that sense that it was a different world. ~ Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal

Why is it so hard to find liberation? Because our own minds are the source of our difficulties. Eliminate desire, accept personal shortcomings, and work toward a patient elimination of the mind's own hunger for outward satisfaction. ~ Ming-Dao Deng

When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision,it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in it's new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally intended. That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed; the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to "protect the revolution." That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant , minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression). ~ Tom Robbins

The only person there was little Sipho Fondini from Standard Six, writing on the wall: "Liberation first, then education." He saw me and called out: "Is the spelling right, Mr M?" And he meant it! The young eyes in that smoke-stained little face were terribly serious. Somewhere else a police van raced past me crowded with children who should have also been at their desks in school. Their hands waving desperately through the bars, their voices called out: "Teacher! Teacher! Help us! Tell our mothers! Tell or fathers! ~ Athol Fugard

If you are seeking liberation, my son, shun the objects of the senses like poison. Practise tolerance, sincerity, compassion, contentment and truthfulness like nectar. ~ Ashtavakra

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise. ~ Nelson Mandela

The meritocracy offered liberation from the unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but swapped in their place a new hierarchy based on the notion that people are deeply unequal in ability and drive. ~ Christopher L. Hayes

Hmm. I think love is about loving all things, to treat each and every thing and every one as a sovereign being that's free to make its own choices. ~ Michael Sanders

What's on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear?
We don't know-as a culture, as a gender, as individuals, you and I. The fact that we don't know is feminism's one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans. ~ Cheryl Strayed

This conversation revealed to Odo a third conception of the religious idea. In Piedmont religion imposed itself as a military discipline, the enforced duty of the Christian citizen to the heavenly state; to the Duke it was a means of purchasing spiritual immunity from the consequences of bodily weakness; to the Bishop, it replaced the panem et circenses of ancient Rome. Where, in all this, was the share of those whom Christ had come to save? Where was Saint Francis's devotion to his heavenly bride, the Lady Poverty? Though here and there a good parish priest like Crescenti ministered to the temporal wants of the peasantry, it was only the free-thinker and the atheist who, at the risk of life and fortune, laboured for their moral liberation. Odo listened with a saddened heart, thinking, as he followed his host through the perfumed shade of the gardens, and down ~ Edith Wharton

Liberation is a constant struggle. And this is a new year. ~ Pearl Cleage

Argument and counterargument were clearly present, and that would have been sufficient to prompt the radical conclusion (drawn, it seems, by the Buddha, and perhaps by Indian sceptics and others) of suspension of judgment as a means to liberation, rather than as a means for pursuing a search for "truth" about what is nonevident. ~ Adrian Kuzminski

Why is it that when Robert Redford-cum-Denys Finch Hatton flies away in the golden glow out of Africa, he is pursuing his destiny? And when I walk away I'm just a chick who's scared of commitment and on the run, who's weird for ignoring Glamour magazine's predictions of my eggs drying up? Learning is an underrated form of liberation. ~ Holly Morris

The Israelis have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation. ~ Yusuf Al-Qaradawi

We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesize their experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them achieve liberation and happiness. ~ Mao Zedong

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others. ~ James A. Baldwin

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization the state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal-the liberation of man from material cares-and has become an obsessive image hanging over the present. Offered the choice of love or a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal. ~ Ivan Chtcheglov

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Thich Nhat Hanh. a venerated Vietnamese Buddhist, speaks of a solution that is so utterly simple it seems profane.

Be, body and mind, exactly where you are. That is, practice a mindfulness that makes you aware of each moment. Think to yourself, "I am breathing" when you're breathing; "I am anxious" when you're anxious; even, "I am washing the dishes" when you're washing the dishes. To be totally into this moment is the goal of mindfulness. Right now is precious and shall never pass this way again.

A wave is a precious moment, amplified: a dynamic natural sculpture that shall never pass this way again. Out interaction with waves - to be fully in the moment, without relationship troubles, bills, or worries - is what frees us. Each moment that we are fully with waves is evidence of our ability to live in the here and now. There is nothing else in the universe when you're making that elegant bottom turn.

Here. Now. Simple, but so elusive.

A wave demands your attention. It is very difficult to be somewhere else, in your mind, when there is such a gorgeous creation of nature moving your way. Just being close to a wave brings us closer to being mindful. To surf them is the training ground for mindfulness. The ocean can seem chaotic, like the world we live in. But somehow we're forced to slice through the noise - to paddle around and through the adversities of life and get directly to the joy. This is what we need for liberation. ~ Kia Afcari

The core of liberation theology is profoundly "theologal" - that is, rooted in the very nature of God. You see, there's an immediate relationship between God, oppression, liberation: God is in the poor who cry out. And God is the one who listens to the cry and liberates, so that the poor no longer need to cry out. ( Leonardo Boff, p. 166) ~ Mev Puleo