“
Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934)
“
Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
...The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau)
“
My world falls apart, crumbles, “The centre cannot hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list. Like for example, I'm still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. But some new things I've fallen in love with -- mismatched everything. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I'd get a chance to win a Grammy. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. ;) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad's stories about college. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. I've loved my fans from the very first day, but they've said things and done things recently that make me feel like they're my friends -- more now than ever before. I'll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.
”
”
Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift Songbook: Guitar Recorded Versions)
“
Art is sacred.
Punk rock is freedom.
Expression and right to express is vital.
Anyone can be artistic.
”
”
Kurt Cobain (Journals)
“
Freedom of speech gives us the right to offend others, whereas freedom of thought gives them the choice as to whether or not to be offended.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.
To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.
”
”
Madeleine L'Engle (The Irrational Season (Crosswicks Journals, #3))
“
I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a place I never had to go, for this earth was greater than any paradise.
”
”
Daniel J. Rice (The UnPeopled Season: Journal from a North Country Wilderness)
“
I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.
”
”
Kurt Cobain (Journals)
“
It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.
”
”
Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
“
One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.
”
”
J. Krishnamurti (Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal)
“
The real world, in my opinion, exists in the countryside, where Nature goes about her quiet business and brings us greatest pleasure.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1)
“
Journalism can be lethal
”
”
Robert Fisk (The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East)
“
We are a generation which is crying loudly to tear down all structure in order to find freedom, and discovering, when order is demolished, that instead of freedom we have death.
”
”
Madeleine L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet (Crosswicks Journals, #1))
“
Find a part of yourself hidden in the twilight.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Traditional Angling: Fennel's Journal No. 6)
“
In freedom you form in utter disgrace,
the bars of my prison this night.
While you drift on currents of seraphim heights,
it is I who deserve to take flight.
”
”
Craig Froman (An Owl on the Moon: A Journal From the Edge of Darkness)
“
What will our children be like ? A lot depends on us. But it's up to them as well. What must be alive in them is a striving for freedom. That depends on us. People who have been born into slavery find it hard to lose the habit.
”
”
Andrei Tarkovsky (Journal 1970-1986)
“
It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual…
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
Escapism preserves our sanity when the ever-increasing complexity and pace of modern life becomes too much.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Wild Carp: Fennel's Journal No. 4)
“
People, like us
we feel... too deeply
consumed, in shadow
this game of chance.
Together, surviving
we unending dreamers.
People... like us.
”
”
Bev Flynn (Pieces of Poet)
“
I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.
”
”
Katherine Mansfield (Letters and Journals)
“
In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing: it ends where the interests of the business begin... In socialist areas, it is enough to recall that the means of social communication are the monopoly of the party.
”
”
Hélder Câmara
“
He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.
”
”
Jennifer Lanthier (The Stamp Collector)
“
No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not enitrely own us. It can't take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action.
”
”
Ryder Carroll (The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future)
“
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect."
[I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must (Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2015)]
”
”
Salman Rushdie
“
How the press, for example, loves to brag to its victims— its readers—about its freedom. Yes, the press may be free to lie and distort and suppress and deceive and malign, but is it free to tell the truth?
”
”
Willis Carto (An Appeal to Reason: a Compendium of the Writings of Willis A. Carto)
“
But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take. It is indeed a fearful gamble. Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.
To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation. It takes a lifetime to learn another person. When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.
”
”
Madeleine L'Engle (The Irrational Season (Crosswicks Journals, #3))
“
It’s not possible to run away from yourself. Unless, of course, you’re schizophrenic and can take holidays outside your mind.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (A Waterside Year: Fennel's Journal No. 2)
“
You are set free whenever you love—even those who believe you're crazy.
”
”
Jef Murray (Seer: A Wizard's Journal)
“
The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism’s uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions.
”
”
Janet Malcolm (The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes)
“
It struck me that there is a reason James Madison put freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the very first amendment. If we can't speak out, if we cannot challenge those in power, there is no guaranteeing the rights that follow.
”
”
Jonathan Karl (Front Row at the Trump Show)
“
I don't care if they are reading our mail. Bring it on, Tron! I dare you. Try to take away my freedom of expression. I'm a journalist. A free-speech warrior. I serve in the Army of the First Amendment. I didn't take this job for the bad money, and the regressive health care coverage. I'm here for the truth, the sunshine, the casting open of closed doors!
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
The Führer is always right. Obey the Führer. The mother is the highest expression of womanhood. The soldier is the highest expression of manhood. God is not punishing us by this war, he is giving us the opportunity to prove whether we are worthy of our freedom.
”
”
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
And what is this whole concept of freedom in the first place? The masses willingly traded that away many years ago for the security and protection of the State. Now they have their simple needs provided for them and are usually content until a few morons try to stir them up.
”
”
Crystal Raven (Virtual Mirrors: First Journal)
“
Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There's a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men's lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings - not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us.
”
”
Madeleine L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet (Crosswicks Journals, #1))
“
It is amusing to wonder whether dreams would matter at all, or "freedom" or "democracy." I think not; I think there would only be the wondering what to eat and where to sleep and how to build out of the wreckage of life and mankind.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
Breathe deeply, focus your thoughts, and say out loud, “The quest begins here.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Wild Carp: Fennel's Journal No. 4)
“
Our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
Freedom of expression is a basic expression of freedom.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
More powerful than armies and police, stronger than guns and bombs, words are what change the world, and that is why they’re always a threat to those that rule with corrupt ways
”
”
Brandt Legg (The Last Librarian (The Justar Journal #1))
“
You need to be outdoors. Away from here. You need a holiday.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Fine Things: Fennel's Journal No. 8)
“
The trouble with free speech is that it insists on living up to its name.
”
”
Jonathan Yardley
“
Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time. The apparently measured time has immeasureable space within it, and in this it resembles music. The routine I established
”
”
May Sarton (Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal)
“
Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle's principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured. For if he embraces Xenophon's and Plato's opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom. Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.
”
”
Michel de Montaigne (The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters)
“
Whenever I’m home for a few days, I start to feel this despair at being back in the place where I had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who I would be once I was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once I was free to commit mistakes on my own. How strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found—in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where I sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until I could leave this place and start my real life. But now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that I had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us—me and my brother—and now that I am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides “daughter” or “sister.” It turns out this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again. Mememememememe.
”
”
Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart)
“
I have always held, with my Madman, that those who understand us enslave something in us. It is not so with you. Your understanding of me is the most peaceful freedom I have known. And in the last two hours of your last visit you took my heart in your hand and found a black spot in it. But just as soon as you found the spot it was erased forever, and I became absolutely chainless.
”
”
Kahlil Gibran (Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and Her Private Journal)
“
Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
”
”
Janet Malcolm (The Journalist and the Murderer)
“
Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
”
”
Michel de Montaigne (The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters)
“
I fled, or at least, backed awkwardly away from journalism because I wanted the freedom to make things up. I did not want to be nailed to the truth; or to be more accurate, I wanted to be able to tell the truth without ever needing to worry about the facts. And
”
”
Neil Gaiman (The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction)
“
Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports)
“
Say what you wish about media in the Arab world, but say it knowing that no media channel in the world is absolutely free.
”
”
Aysha Taryam
“
It is possible to escape the complexities, challenges and pace of modern life. All we have to do is close our eyes and picture a quiet world where time moves slowly.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1)
“
Stop – Unplug – Escape – Enjoy.’ This is the message of the Priory, and the key to enjoying a peaceful and rewarding life.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1)
“
There’s merit in being different, inspiration in being individual, courage in being unique, and freedom in being yourself.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (A Waterside Year: Fennel's Journal No. 2)
“
Isolation serves as the ideal antidote to the bone-aching stresses of work.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Wild Carp: Fennel's Journal No. 4)
“
We seek not for forgiveness, but the freedom and time to do more than ‘exist’.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Wild Carp: Fennel's Journal No. 4)
“
I was disoriented by the idea that men should ever leave the forest.
”
”
Daniel J. Rice (The UnPeopled Season: Journal from a North Country Wilderness)
“
That overzealous new natural is not intentionally trying to cause you pain. She just lovingly wants her sister to know the freedom of accepting, loving and nurturing her natural hair texture. Once that level of freedom is achieved, one can truly know that we are not our hair.
”
”
Monica Millner (The Natural Hair Journal)
“
Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, 'Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned?' The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. 'Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.
”
”
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
“
I wrote in my journal about how good I felt when I was not living under Ed’s control. Then, when I really felt like giving up, I read these pages and realized that I was striving for in recovery was a real possibility. I thought about these experiences and used them as encouragement to keep moving forward. Even one minute of freedom was proof that I was getting better. At first, these times were few and far between. Now, these moments are connected; they are my life
”
”
Jenni Schaefer (Life Without Ed: How One Woman Declared Independence from Her Eating Disorder and How You Can Too)
“
To the RKO motion picture camera at her 100th birthday party: “I pray for the day when working men and women are able to earn a fair share of the wealth they produce in a capitalist system, a day when all Americans are able to enjoy the freedom, rights and opportunities guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States of America.” — Mother Jones
”
”
Jerry Ash (Hellraiser—Mother Jones: An Historical Novel)
“
Media who pretend to write stories about groups whose voices are never heard but write almost universally through the lens of western men instead, are ensuring that all interpretations and solutions come from the same small segment of society.
”
”
Heather Marsh
“
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.
”
”
Oscar Wilde
“
Where wilderness can still be found, the ancientness of the land and the nobility of man's struggle emerge. Wilderness is vastly different from the clutter and clatter of much of our civilized world. In wilderness one experiences exhilaration and joy. In freedom and simplicity, in its vitality and immense variety, happiness may not only be pursued; it is ofttimes found.
”
”
Harvey Broome (Out Under The Sky Of The Great Smokies: A Personal Journal)
“
Gravitites are particles that exist free of time. Once they become a part of you, time is forced to release its hold on your destiny. What you do with that freedom is up to you. Try to show some originality. ”–Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1885 Chapter
”
”
Nathan Van Coops (The Chronothon (In Times Like These #2))
“
Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience....
If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.
Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.
Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.
”
”
Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget)
“
They are not faithful. Above all, they have a blemish, a wound, comparable to the bunch of grapes in Stilitano’s pants. In short, the greater my guilt in your eyes, the more whole, the more totally assumed, the greater will be my freedom. The more perfect my solitude and singleness.
”
”
Jean Genet (The Thief's Journal)
“
You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's
powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and
took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course;
but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a soi. And when one hears good
talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it
inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth
breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the
same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "Voyez-vous, Monsieur,
to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after all, one must earn
enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a `private' anything--is almost
as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge:
an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America-- in New
York?
”
”
Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)
“
When I watched the Twin Towers fall, I said aloud to my naked friend, “There go our civil liberties.” A few months later I called George Carlin and we were chatting about America’s reaction to the attack. I told him my thoughts. He excused himself, put down the phone, and went and got his journal. As the Twin Towers fell, he had written, “There go our civil rights.” I was so proud to have had a similar thought at a similar time to a genius. We were sad to be right. To react to an attack on our freedom with less freedom seems so deeply un-American. What ever happened to Yankee Doodle Dandy and “fuck you in the fucking neck”?
”
”
Penn Jillette (God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales)
“
The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often,
a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose
in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;
chose “Angel Band” by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar,
ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks.
We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginia
knocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea.
No one asked why he was so solemn today.
It was warm. It was relatively quiet.
To anyone else, this place could feel sinister.
But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place.
No one was ever here long enough to know us.
And we liked it that way.
”
”
Taylor Rhodes (Sixteenth Notes: the breaking of the rose-colored glasses)
“
If you have burning desire to be free (as I have) you must first find this freedom within you. And to be free in this manner, you have to be comfortable with who and what you are.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (A Waterside Year: Fennel's Journal No. 2)
“
People's abuse through journalism should not be taken us freedom of press.
”
”
Oscar Auliq-Ice
“
Freedom for freedoms sake."
~R. Alan Woods [2006]
”
”
R. Alan Woods (The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal)
“
I long for a noble escape from freedom
”
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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To set free my ideas
while the world was still building a cage
was the biggest mistake I've ever made.
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Laura Chouette
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Writing is not necessarily difficult. However, writing something that will outlive you is another matter.
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John J. McBrearty (COMBAT JOURNAL, Operation Iraqi Freedom: Part 1 of 4)
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If the one who is to get us the news is in chains, the news may get to us but with chains!
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Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison about the checks and balances in a democratic government, and that is how other institutions steer communities of biased and ambition-addled people toward disinterested truth. Examples include the adversarial system in law, peer review in science, editing and fact-checking in journalism, academic freedom in universities, and freedom of speech in the public sphere. Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.
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Steven Pinker (Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters)
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How watchful we must be to keep the crystal well that we were made, clear!—that it be not made turbid by our contact with the world, so that it will not reflect objects. What other liberty is there worth having, if we have not freedom and peace in our minds,—if our inmost and most private man is but a sour and turbid pool? Often we are so jarred by chagrins in dealing with the world, that we cannot reflect.
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Henry David Thoreau (The Journal, 1837-1861)
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This freedom of choice is a double-edged privilege. Every decision requires you to focus, and focus is an investment of your time and energy. Both are limited—and therefore exceptionally valuable—resources.
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Ryder Carroll (The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future)
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Freedom of the press can never be the licence to say anything one desires. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to slander and attack and must never be used to fight other people’s wars. It does not mean manipulating a story into speaking your views. One might think it common sense but in the world of journalism a lot of what makes sense is lost to the lure of favouritism, greed and fame. Sadly, in this truth-telling business truth is hard to find.
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Aysha Taryam
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Desire is a mighty force, one of your most divine attributes! Whatsoever things ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye have received them and ye shall have them! See the Godlike quality of desire. For it is part of the Atomic energy of the soul. The Kingdom of Heaven within you is operated through desire. Do not quench it or crush
it or suppress it. Rather offer it to Me. Offer Me your most elementary desires, your craving for happiness, for love, for self-expression, for well-being, for success, for joy, on any level of your being-offer these freely and without shame to Me and I will transmute them so that you shall achieve release and fulfillment and complete freedom from frustration.2
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Leanne Payne (Listening Prayer: Learning to Hear God's Voice and Keep a Prayer Journal)
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In early missionary journals Osages were often described as being ‘the happiest people in the world.’… They had a sense of freedom because they didn’t own anything and nothing owned them. But the Osage Nation was in the way of the economic drive of the European world… and life as they once knew it would never be the same.” The statement continued, “Today our hearts are divided between two worlds. We are strong and courageous, learning to walk in these two worlds, hanging on to the threads of our culture and traditions as we live in a predominantly non-Indian society. Our history, our culture, our heart, and our home will always be stretching our legs across the plains, singing songs in the morning light, and placing our feet down with the ever beating heart of the drum. We walk in two worlds.
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David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
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We smoked fat cigars by the campfire and they tasted like wood and ash. The inhale and exhale was exciting. Blowing smoke rings in the calm forest air was followed by a deep swallow of cheap beer, and this too was exciting. There was no judgment in the wild, and so indulgences were plentiful. There were no regulators here and we were free to indulge in the deep intoxications that made our minds free.
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Daniel J. Rice (The UnPeopled Season: Journal from a North Country Wilderness)
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In modern democracies, press freedom was being used as a cloak to shield media conglomerates’ domination of public discussion ‘in which misinformation may be peddled uncorrected and in which reputations may be selectively shredded or magnified. A free press is not an unconditional good.’ When the media mislead, she added, ‘the wells of public discourse and public life are poisoned’.
Dr Onora O’Neill
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Ian Hargreaves (Journalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me—that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were “a specimen American young poet” to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist’s store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling.
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May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)
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This Insane Asylum has been to me the gate to Heaven,”25 she later wrote—because it had brought her to this rebirth and to what she saw as her new divine mission. “For woman’s sake I suffer [here],” she scribbled in her journal. “I will try to continue to suffer on, patiently and uncomplainingly, confidently hoping that my case will lead [the] community to investigate for themselves, and see why it is, that so many sane women are thus persecuted.
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Kate Moore (The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear)
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In the world of journalism, the personal Web site ("blog") was hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs-and the best are very clever- have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become mediators for the informed public.
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Fareed Zakaria (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad)
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Well, honey, it’s capitalism that brings out the meanness and greed,” says I. “Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enjoy the freedoms the Constitution offers. But capitalism came along without a constitution or a bill of rights and the industrialists grabbed unrestricted power. The capitalists wrote their own ‘Declaration of Capitalism’.” — Mother Jones
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Jerry Ash (Hellraiser—Mother Jones: An Historical Novel)
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In 2003, Meryl Streep won a career achievement César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar. Streep’s words (my translation) acknowledged the enduring interest of French audiences in women’s lives and women’s stories:
"I have always wanted to present stories of women who are rather difficult. Difficult to love, difficult to understand, difficult to look at sometimes. I am very cognizant that the French public is receptive to these complex and contradictory women. As an actress I have understood for a long time that lies are simple, seductive and often easy to pass off. But the truth—the truth is always very very very complicated, often unpleasant, nuanced or difficult to accept."
In France, an actress can work steadily from her teens through old age—she can start out in stories of youthful rebellion and end up, fifty years later, a screen matriarch. And in the process, her career will end up telling the story of a life—her own life, in a sense, with the films serving, as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi puts it, as a “journal intime,” or diary, of one woman’s emotions and growth. No wonder so many French actresses are beautiful. They’re radiant with living in a cinematic culture that values them, and values them as women. And they are radiant with living in a culture—albeit one with flaws of its own—in which women are half of who decides what gets valued in the first place. Their films transcend national and language barriers and are the best vehicles for conveying the depth and range of women’s experience in our era. The gift they give us, so absent in our own movies, is a vision of life that values emotional truth, personal freedom and dignity above all and that favors complexity over simplicity, the human over the machine, maturity over callowness, true mysteries over false explanations and an awareness of mortality over a life lived in denial.
In the luminous humanity of their faces and in the illuminated humanity of their characters, we discover in these actresses something much more inspiring than the blank perfection and perfect blankness of the Hollywood starlet. We discover the beauty of the real.
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Mick LaSalle (The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses)
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Sí, dijo Pereira, pero si ellos tuvieran razón mi vida no tendría sentido, no tendría sentido haber estudiado Letras en Coimbra y haber creído siempre que la literatura era la cosa más importante del mundo, no tendría sentido que yo dirija la página cultural de ese periódico vespertino en el que no puedo expresar mi opinión y en el que tengo que publicar cuentos del siglo XIX francés, ya nada tendría sentido, y es de eso de lo que siento deseos de arrepentirme, como si yo fuera otra persona y no el Pereira que ha sido siempre periodista, como si tuviera que renegar de algo.
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Antonio Tabucchi (Sostiene Pereira)
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As I began to prune and shrivel I thought about going to the police and falsely confessing to everything, anything they wanted, just to get it over with. After a few years a college journalism class would review my trial and see that I was obviously innocent. There would be embarrassing publicity. The governor would grant me a pardon and I’d be released. At my press conference I’d say, “I knew God would make this day happen. In my heart, I was always free.” And then I would weep. And then I would sue the shit out of the city and the mayor’s office and the police department and anybody else I could find, to make sure that no one would ever have to suffer such terrible freedom in their heart again.
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Paul Neilan (Apathy and Other Small Victories: A Novel)
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March 22, 2014
I have found the truth in the lies I told myself. I thought I could run from this woman, but she continues to chase me. In my mind, my heart, she’s always there. An entire bottle of whiskey can’t drown out her voice. I wake up each morning hoping it will finally be the day that I get over her. But then night falls and memories of her begin to torture me until sleep is no longer an option. Each night I fall into this abyss of nothingness, feeling only the emptiness of not having her beside me.
I have found the truth in the lies I told myself. I slept with another woman, all the while wishing it was her and I still went through with it.
What a fool I was. I still long to feel the satisfaction I was supposed to have felt that night. I still long to feel the freedom I’d hoped to gain from seeking refuge in the arms of another woman. But I’ll never be free of her. It will take an eternity to break out of these shackles.
For one month, ONE month I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants and yet for two years I haven’t even so much as looked at another woman. I’ve remained completely faithful to a memory. Devoted to her smile.
Committed to her ever-changing green eyes. I have read through the past entries in this journal and I noticed that I have never used her name. As if inking it would somehow solidify the feelings I think I’ve always felt.
I have found the truth in the lies I told myself. I do love her.
Love is this painful.
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Jacqueline Francis - The Journal
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Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.
I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit.
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Hunter S. Thompson
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If I know the classical psychological theories well enough to pass my comps and can reformulate them in ways that can impress peer reviewers from the most prestigious journals, but have not the practical wisdom of love, I am only an intrusive muzak soothing the ego while missing the heart.
And if I can read tea leaves, throw the bones and manipulate spirits so as to understand the mysteries of the universe and forecast the future with scientific precision, and if I have achieved a renaissance education in both the exoteric and esoteric sciences that would rival Faust and know the equation to convert the mass of mountains into psychic energy and back again, but have not love, I do not even exist.
If I gain freedom from all my attachments and maintain constant alpha waves in my consciousness, showing perfect equanimity in all situations, ignoring every personal need and compulsively martyring myself for the glory of God, but this is not done freely from love, I have accomplished nothing.
Love is great-hearted and unselfish; love is not emotionally reactive, it does not seek to draw attention to itself. Love does not accuse or compare. It does not seek to serve itself at the expense of others. Love does not take pleasure in other peeople's sufferings, but rejoices when the truth is revealed and meaningful life restored. Love always bears reality as it is, extending mercy to all people in every situation. Love is faithful in all things, is constantly hopeful and meets whatever comes with immovable forbearance and steadfastness. Love never quits.
By contrast, prophecies give way before the infinite possibilities of eternity, and inspiration is as fleeting as a breath. To the writing and reading of many books and learning more and more, there is no end, and yet whatever is known is never sufficient to live the Truth who is revealed to the world only in loving relationship.
When I was a beginning therapist, I thought a lot and anxiously tried to fix people in order to lower my own anxiety. As I matured, my mind quieted and I stopped being so concerned with labels and techniques and began to realize that, in the mystery of attentive presence to others, the guest becomes the host in the presence of God. In the hospitality of genuine encounter with the other, we come face to face with the mystery of God who is between us as both the One offered One who offers.
When all the theorizing and methodological squabbles have been addressed, there will still only be three things that are essential to pastoral counseling: faith, hope, and love. When we abide in these, we each remain as well, without comprehending how, for the source and raison d'etre of all is Love.
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Stephen Muse (When Hearts Become Flame: An Eastern Orthodox Approach to the Dia-Logos of Pastoral Counseling)
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Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!
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Kwame Nkrumah
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Controlled by the government, a free press may become a strong ally,’ Napoleon said years later, apparently unaware of the contradiction in terms. ‘To leave it to its own devices is to sleep beside a powder keg.’55 On another occasion he declared: ‘The printing press is an arsenal; it cannot be private property.’56 He had learned the power of stage-managed proclamations in Italy and Egypt and was not now prepared to cede control over communications at home. France had no tradition of press freedom before the Revolution. Freedom of speech was declared to be a universal right in 1789, and the number of officially sanctioned journals ballooned from four to over three hundred, but the government started closing journals as early as 1792, and periodic purging on political grounds had brought the number down to seventy-three by 1799.57 Freedom of the press didn’t exist in Prussia, Russia or Austria at the time, and even in 1819 the British government passed the notorious Six Acts, which tightened the definition of sedition, and by which three editors were arraigned. That was in peacetime, whereas France in January 1800 was at war with five countries, each of which had vowed to overthrow its government. Objectionable by modern standards, Napoleon’s move was little other than standard practice for his time and circumstances.
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Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life)
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One thing we were sure of, we did not want to become accredited as regular correspondents, with correspondents’ credentials, for in that case we should have been under the sponsorship and control of the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office rules are very strict regarding correspondents, and if we once became their babies, we could not have left Moscow without special permission, which is rarely granted. We could not have traveled with any freedom, and our material would have been subject to Foreign Office censorship. These things we did not want, for we had already talked to the American and British correspondents in Moscow, and we had found that their reporting activities were more or less limited to the translation of Russian daily papers and magazines, and the transmission of their translations, and even then censorship quite often cut large pieces out of their cables. And some of the censorship was completely ridiculous. Once, one American correspondent, in describing the city of Moscow, said that the Kremlin is triangular in shape. He found this piece of information cut out of his copy. Indeed, there were no censorship rules on which one could depend, but the older correspondents, the ones who had been in Moscow a long time, knew approximately what they could and could not get through. That eternal battle between correspondents and censor goes on.
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John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal)
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Everything has already been caught, until my death, in an icefloe of being: my trembling when a piece of rough trade asks me to brown him (I discover that his desire is his trembling) during a Carnival night; at twilight, the view from a sand dune of Arab warriors surrendering to French generals; the back of my hand placed on a soldier's basket, but especially the sly way in which the soldier looked at it; suddenly I see the ocean between two houses in Biarritz; I am escaping from the reformatory, taking tiny steps, frightened not at the idea of being caught but of being the prey of freedom; straddling the enormous prick of a blond legionnaire, I am carried twenty yards along the ramparts; not the handsome football player, nor his foot, nor his shoe, but the ball, then ceasing to be the ball and becoming the “kick-off,” and I cease being that to become the idea that goes from the foot to the ball; in a cell, unknown thieves call me Jean; when at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind's heaven. Some negroes are giving me food on the Bordeaux docks; a distinguished poet raises my hands to his forehead; a German soldier is killed in the Russian snows and his brother writes to inform me; a boy from Toulouse helps me ransack the rooms of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers of my regiment in Brest: he dies in prison; I am talking of someone–and while doing so, the time to smell roses, to hear one evening in prison the gang bound for the penal colony singing, to fall in love with a white-gloved acrobat–dead since the beginning of time, that is, fixed, for I refuse to live for any other end than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext.
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Jean Genet (The Thief's Journal)