JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Existentialism is a Humanism

A man who belongs to some communist or revolutionary society wills certain concrete ends, which imply the will to freedom, and that freedom is willed in community. We will freedom for freedom's sake, and in and through the particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own.

HARRIET TUBMAN

If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.

JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

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SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

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DAN BROWN
The Da Vinci Code

Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.

HARVEY MILK

It takes no compromise to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.

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ANGELA DAVIS

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

It's almost like America is moving into the 21st Century ... in a FEW areas.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale

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There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

 

DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
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Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

SUSAN SONTAG

“Literature and Freedom”
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One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Writers can do something to combat the clichés of our separateness, our difference - for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but countermyths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

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“Literature and Freedom” was Susan Sontag’s acceptance speech after being awarded the Friedenspreis, the Peace Prize of the German book trade, in 2003.

HALLDÓR LAXNESS
The Fish Can Sing

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A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father.

JOSEPHINE BAKER

Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.

LYSANDER SPOONER

There is not, in the Constitution, a syllable that implies that persons, born within the territorial limits of the United States, have allegiance imposed upon them on account of their birth in the country, or that they will be judged by any different rule, on the subject of treason, than persons of foreign birth.