Intriguing Freedom Quotes

David, you have been so kind to me and this gift will always be treasured. I have one last request. Could you show me some of the secret ways in and out of the castle?” As he spoke the words, the image of the spark of red light appearing from the depths of the castle sprang to his mind again, together with the whispered words, “I am here, Audun.” He knew that one day he would have to return to Aldene and learn the secret of what lay in the deep dungeon below the castle

The more I protested about this ambiguity, the more Joanna pointed out to me that it was both a terrible and wonderful part of life: terrible because you can't count on anything for sure—like certain good health and no possibility of cancer; wonderful because no human being knows when another is going to die—no doctor can absolutely predict the outcome of a disease. The only thing that is certain is change. Joanna calls all of this 'delicious ambiguity.' 'Couldn't there be comfort and freedom in no one knowing the outcome of anything and all things being possible?' she asked. Was I convinced? Not completely. I still wanted to believe in magic thinking. But I was intrigued.

Words to intrigue, inspire, examine, question, praise; Words to help us appreciate our world, our selves, our games; Words to dance our true soul fires gracefully free.

What hideous luck to be wretchedly stuck on this miserable blockading duty! What I need is a ship I can capture and strip to sequester my share of the booty. Oh, the treasure I’d net would remit all my debt and buy an estate with a gold coronet. Oh, captain who’s wise has his eye on the prize while he’s serving his country and King, oh sing, of a well-deserved rest in a well-feathered nest and the riches that duty can bring!

As long as we continue to search for enemies anywhere but inside ourselves, there will always be a Middle East problem. Religion is not the solution. Religion without Jesus is just self-righteousness. Freedom from oppression will not resolve things either. Delivered from the oppression of Europe, Israel became the oppressor. Delivered from persecution, Muslims became persecutors. Abused spouses and children often go on to abuse spouses and children. It is a cliché, but it’s still true: hurt people, unless they are healed, hurt people.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn’t worked together. That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.

More intriguingly, in poll after poll, when Americans are asked what public institutions they most respect, three bodies are always at the top of their list: the Supreme Court, the armed forces, and the Federal Reserve System. All three have one thing in common: they are insulated from the public pressures and operate undemocratically. It would seem that Americans admire these institutions, preciselly because they lead rather than follow.

What is intriguing about this passage in 1 Corinthians is that it gives us an approach to self-regard, an approach to the self and a way of seeing ourselves that is absolutely different from both traditional and modern/postmodern contemporary cultures. Utterly different. The

White people found that freedom was indeed indivisible. We had kept saying in the dark days of apartheid’s oppression that white South Africans would never be truly free until we blacks were free as well. Many thought it was just another Tutu slogan, irresponsible as all his others had been. Today they were experiencing it as a reality. I used to refer to an intriguing old film The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier was one of the stars. Two convicts escape from a chain gang. They are manacled together, the one white, the other black. They fall into a ditch with slippery sides. The one convict claws his way nearly to the top and out of the ditch but cannot make it because he is bound to his mate, who has been left at the bottom in the ditch. The only way they can make it is together as they strive up and up and up together and eventually make their way over the side wall and out.

but I gathered that Violet had been in and out of many beds in her young life, and that not every bed had had a man in it. For Erica, who had slept with exactly three men in the course of her thirty-nine years, Violet's erotic adventures were more than intriguing anecdotes. They were tales of enviable daring and freedom.

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends.

Its history is an especially rich and intriguing one for women: the great salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave women an intellectual influence and freedom; in the nineteenth century, for the bohemian and the flâneuse pleasure and revolution were a seductive mix; in the mid-twentieth century, Paris spelled freedom for Simone de Beauvoir who set the standard for contemporary feminism in her exhilarating The Second Sex.

[L]ife presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment, but as a task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares, constant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme exertion of all the powers of body and mind. Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on account of his own; but many thousands fall as a sacrifice for it. Now senseless delusions, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with each other; then the sweat and the blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of individuals, or to expiate their faults. In peace industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for some thing that is of no value. But when we consider it more closely, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or motive.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn’t worked together. That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” he admonished the House of Representatives in a speech of his own on July 4, 1821: She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners, . . . she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

It's intriguing to observe so many of the outrageous prophecies, made with such biting satire years ago in the first edition, come into being through the craft of so many self-entitled egomaniacs running a global 'corpornation' for personal interest and professional profit. I had no idea then, as I now know, that I was writing with so much understatement. Honest outrage and political satire are two of the most important weapons that we have to protect infringement against our personal freedoms through oligarchy and to maintain any semblance of humanity in our democracy as our government aggressively privatizes and over-reaches at the expense of those millions whom it has sworn so dishonestly to serve and has utterly abandoned.

We always want what is not ours. It’s intriguing. We think if we can just get that, we’ll finally be happy. The lure of what we do not have is deceptive. True freedom, however, is found in being content with what we already have. Can you imagine it? Can you imagine being whole, complete, fulfilled - content with what you already have? It sounds too good to be true. Utter satisfaction? That is freedom. That is what everyone is searching for. Where, though, can you find this kind of contentment? I've noticed that the more I’ve come to know Jesus, the less I've desired material things. Materialism is what happens when you find your joy in things. Contentment is what happens when you find your joy in Jesus. They’re complete opposites. You can easily differentiate a materialistic person from a content person.

I can’t write Krakow’s history, even though its people and ideas, trees and walls, cowardice and courage, freedom and rain all involve me. Ideas as well, since they cling to our skin and change us imperceptibly. The Zeitgeist chisels our thoughts and mocks our dreams. I’m intrigued by all kinds of walls; the space we inhabit isn’t neutral, it shapes our existence. Landscapes enter our innermost being, they leave traces not just on our retinas but on the deepest strata of our personalities. Those moments when the sky’s blue-gray suddenly stands revealed after a downpour stay with us, as do moments of quiet snowfall. And ideas may even join forces with the snow, through our senses and our body. They cling to the walls of houses. And later the houses and bodies, the senses and ideas all vanish. But I can’t write Krakow’s history, I can only try to reclaim a few moments, a few places and events; a few people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised.

Tom Demarco, a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild team of consultants ... and his colleague Timothy Lister devised a study called the Coding War Games. The purpose of the games was to identify the characteristics of the best and worst computer programmers; more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical. When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you'd think would matter — such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work — had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with 10 years' experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below — even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in "zero-defect" work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes. It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

Imagine having an active mind trapped inside a body that is entirely paralyzed except for the ability to move your eyes sideways and blink your eyelids. A few people are living in this nightmare, called Locked-In Syndrome. A mere millimeter makes the difference between ending up in a coma (unconscious) or in Locked-In Syndrome (conscious). Both are caused by trauma to the brain stem (located at the base of the neck and involved in regulating basic body functions). If the trauma is to the front of the brain stem, the motor pathways are destroyed but patients are alert. Since the nerves for blinking and eye movement are at the back of the brain stem, they can still move their eyes. This tragic condition has given us an intriguing clue about the connection between acetylcholine and the enjoyment introverts gain from introspection. Although it seems as if people with Locked-In Syndrome should feel claustrophobic and terrified, researchers were shocked to find they don’t. Although sad about their situation, these patients report a sense of tranquility and lack of terror about their loss of physical freedom. In these patients acetylcholine is blocked to the muscles but not to brain pathways, so their capacity to feel good about living in their internal world (the enjoyment from thinking and feeling) remains intact.

The tendency to want what has been banned and therefore to presume that it is more worthwhile is not limited to such commodities as laundry soap. In fact, the tendency is not limited to commodities at all but extends to restrictions on information. In an age when the ability to acquire, store, and manage information is becoming increasingly the determinant of wealth and power, it is important to understand how we typically react to attempts to censor or otherwise constrain our access to information. Although much data exist on our reactions to various kinds of potentially censorable material—media violence, pornography, radical political rhetoric—there is surprisingly little evidence as to our reactions to the act of censoring them. Fortunately, the results of the few studies that have been done on the topic are highly consistent. Almost invariably, our response to the banning of information is a greater desire to receive that information and a more favorable attitude toward it than before the ban.112 The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not that audience members want to have the information more than they did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument. This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship. Perhaps the authors of this country’s Constitution were acting as much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain freedom of speech, they may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational course of psychological reactance.

Time And Memory It's intriguing how a certain Point in our lives lingers with us. It's marked by a certain face, A haunting song, and of course A particular feeling. That point seems to define us, And its Memory fills us with melancholy - Through the knowledge that we had met Our happiest self, and were Too naive to hold on to it. That point where potential Met purpose, and love was a happy Song, and freedom was the wind on A butterfly's wings, and passion Was illicit yet unrestrained. Funny how the stolen fruit Is always the sweetest - Yet when immersed in morality That sweetness is leached, and Joys are exchanged for secrets. Funny how this Time flies by The swiftest, without the Slightest glance backwards, Taking our bodies hostage But leaving our minds behind. That point in our lives, where The body yearns to return, Just for a moment, to take Hold of its reality. But Time will never allow it, And gives Memory only a glimpse of it. The moments are never fully ours at all

What caused the cultural shifts of the ’60s? I accepted the consensus that the civil rights movement, the folk music renaissance, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic world had been the immediate stimuli, but I wanted to dig into older and deeper roots for that most intriguing era. I ended up finding a fundamental origin in the ongoing relationship between white, often young Americans and African American culture, primarily music.

In the absence of homework, “students come in all the time and hand me articles about something we talked about in class or tell me about a news report they saw. When intrigued by a good lesson and given freedom [from homework], they naturally seek out more knowledge.

Kierkegaard’s analysis of this “fear of freedom” is an intriguing one, pursued and expanded on by philosophers as different as Jean-Paul Sartre and Erich Fromm (1900–80). It can make individuals and whole societies “inauthentic”. People, as individuals or en masse, are too often happy to “escape” this fear by retreating into an obedience to ideologies dictated by others.

the people who claim the moral high ground, who claim to be about freedom of choice, but who bully everyone who doesn’t choose their way of freedom.

Seize the opportunities when their imaginations are wandering, and give them the freedom to chase them. The books and projects are patient. The question is, are you? The world is your classroom. Your curiosity is the course. Get a degree in the life lessons that intrigue you, and print out your own diploma acknowledging the work that you’ve done. Wonder is waiting. Afterword WHEN I DECIDED TO HOMESCHOOL, THE FIRST BOOK I read to my children was The Call of the Wild by Jack London.

As his readers soon notice, Heidegger tends to reject familiar philosophical terms in favour of new ones which he coins himself. He leaves the German Sein or Being more or less as it is, but when it comes to talking about the questioner for whom its Being is in question (i.e. me, a human), he strenuously avoids talk of humanity, man, mind, soul or consciousness, because of the scientific, religious or metaphysical assumptions such words conceal. Instead, he speaks of ‘Dasein’, a word normally meaning ‘existence’ in a general way, and compounded of da (there) and sein (to be). Thus, it means ‘there-being’, or ‘being-there’. The effect is at once disconcerting and intriguing. Reading Heidegger, and feeling (as one often does) that you recognise an experience he is describing, you want to say, ‘Yes, that’s me!’ But the word itself deflects you from this interpretation; it forces you to keep questioning. Just getting into the habit of saying Dasein takes you halfway into Heidegger’s world. It is so important a term that English translators tend to leave it in the original German; an early partial French translation by Henry Corbin rendered it as ‘réalité humaine’, which created another layer of confusion.

When we see someone who intrigues us, we like to feel free to respond, and, as we explore our response, to discover whatever is special about this new, fascinating person. We like relating to different kinds of people and reveling in how our differences expand our horizons and offer us new ways to be ourselves.

its recent developments would have staggered Marx. He feared the Tsars as leaders of reaction; he wrote: “The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its manoeuvres may change, but the polar star of its policy—world domination—is a fixed star”. Marx lived and worked in England and wrote for the New York Tribune and looked to the Anglo-Saxon people to carry out his theories and set the world free from economic exploitation. Instead it is the men of the Kremlin, the men full of suspicion and fear, the teachers of intrigue and hatred, who are operating in his name and publishing official translations of his works from which most of his expressions concerning Russia and freedom have been cut out.

These communities of radicals were not only intriguing to my young, impressionable mind but also inspiring, as life in these makeshift communes was broken down to the most basic human elements, forgoing the trappings of conventional existence (materialism, greed, and social status) for a life of protest, freedom, and the understanding that we all need each other to get by.

They’re no more old hat to me than anybody else,” Simon said in response to Hugoson’s opening remark. “We all have fantastic dreams. I happen to have a knack for putting mine into practice. Your author has a knack for putting his on paper. It’s just that paper leaves quite a bit more freedom than real life.” Hugoson stuck close beside him as the Saint strolled through the rapidly emptying lobby towards the doors which led to the open area under the marquee. “You weren’t bored, then?” “Not a bit. As a matter of fact, I’ve read all seven of the books by your Mr Amos Klein, and he has an unabashed disregard for probability and the laws of nature that completely intrigues me. Reading him is the next best thing to floating free in space. And apparently several million other people think so too.” They stepped out into the wide space between the front doors of the theatre and the street, where a milling throng was gathered in a chaos of blinding lights, cameras, microphones, and departing taxicabs and limousines. “I’m sure Mr Klein would be delighted to hear your opinion of his work,” Hugoson said.

About Tough as Silk, Escape from Beijing Uta Christensen did it again! With Tough as Fine Silk, Escape from Beijing, she wrote a most fascinating novel, so different from her other books. What impressed me first is her incredible knowledge of China. I learned so much about that part of the world—the historical, cultural and political aspects—through her wonderful and detailed expositions during that long train ride. I wondered whether she followed that route herself when she visited China. The intriguing love story that Ms. Christensen has so masterfully interwoven is a delightful contrast. It brings the reader back to reality, even though it does not feel quite real at times with all the premonitions hinting at a different outcome than desired. The betrayal was a shock, of course, but thinking about the planned future of the couple in California, it becomes clear that that kind of life would not have suited lovely Juan. She yearns for freedom, success, and independence—for a life that she can control herself. The intricate ideas Ms. Christensen brought together in this book and the easy-flowing style make the reading of the novel a true pleasure. I am happy she wrote this fine book, and I hope she will find a lot of excited readers. The finished product should make her very happy and proud.

Memory could weave thousands of those threads together, and in what became my most intriguing discovery, memory often employed the senses to accomplish it. Textures, sounds, smells could all be time machines, sending a person back through life to discover moments that complemented or matched the present. The phenomenon not only captivated my scientific interest, but also restored a measure of my freedom, transporting me outside the facility.

Peter thought he’d be greeted as a liberator, that Gawker was a scourge that once eliminated would allow for open, collaborative discussion. If anything, the opposite has happened. The candidate he helped put in office embodies many of the bullying traits that Thiel claimed to abhor. Trump would also come to actively stymie expression, threatening to “open up” the libel laws in this country and pressuring NFL owners to fire the players who kneeled during the national anthem. This must hit Thiel sometimes, perhaps in the quiet cabin of his Gulfstream, that the man in the White House is essentially the opposite of everything he had spent his life believing in, that Trump threatened the very libertarian freedoms and open civil discourse that Thiel had spent his money protecting. To know he is associated with that, in certain ways responsible for it, might be the most unintended consequence of all.

According to Hammurabi, there is inherent inequality among human beings, dictated by the gods, while the American constitution states precisely the opposite but with the same divine sanction, stating that ‘all men were created equal.