Freedom — Philosophical Quotes
Sartre said we're condemned to it. Camus said it starts with rebellion. Beauvoir said it's always situated, always tangled with other people's freedom. Freire said the oppressed and the oppressor both need it. None of them meant freedom the way a beer commercial means it. They meant the vertigo of knowing there is no script, no authority that can tell you what your life should be. It sounds like a gift. It feels like a weight. It's both.
65 quotes from 21 voices: Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Simone de Beauvoir, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frantz Fanon, Virginia Woolf, Herbert Marcuse, Søren Kierkegaard, Audre Lorde, Rabindranath Tagore, Günter Grass, George Orwell, Rollo May.
- “Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the inter...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Ev...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “A man without hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free tha...” — Albert Camus, The Rebel
- “I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I...” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “Modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simult...” — Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
- “Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need y...” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
- “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the ver...” — Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
- “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either fun...” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- “Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generatin...” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- “Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emer...” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against opp...” — bell hooks, Outlaw Culture
- “To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality...” — bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody
- “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort o...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
- “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
- “Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.” — Franz Kafka, The Trial
- “Existence precedes essence. Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surg...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
- “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is respon...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
- “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations
- “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of expe...” — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself m...” — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- “Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject ...” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
- “To will oneself free is also to will others free.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
- “Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” — Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done
- “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the nati...” — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
- “What matters is not to know the world but to change it.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
- “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
- “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
- “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced ...” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
- “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
- “The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it...” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
- “The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have ...” — Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation
- “Surplus repression is the restrictions necessitated by social domination. Thi...” — Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
- “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
- “Do it or do not do it — you will regret both.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
- “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, t...” — Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
- “Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and tempo...” — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “Let my love, like sunlight, surround you and yet give you illumined freedom.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is ...” — Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
- “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” — Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
- “The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.” — Günter Grass, Dog Years
- “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and ...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expec...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunc...” — Albert Camus, The Rebel
- “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than f...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so pain...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us: Make us you...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt th...” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
- “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face ...” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted...” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, ...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
- “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than f...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “Anxiety is not something we have but something we are. It is our state of bei...” — Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
- “The purpose of psychotherapy is not to make people adjusted but to set them f...” — Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
- “Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, w...” — Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
- “Whoever has learned to be alone with himself knows only too well how hard it ...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
- “We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are — that...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness