Liberation Quotes - Page 6

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

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Doubt, Earth, Blind

  Simone de Beauvoir (2014). “The Second Sex”, p.182, Random House

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• I like that people can just look at you and know that you are taken, that you are mine.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “And yes, I know that sentiment is at the top of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s list of things not to say to a modern woman

  Patricia Briggs

  Taken, Eye, People

  Patricia Briggs (2011). “River Marked”, p.39, Penguin

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• who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.

  C. S. Lewis

  Struggle, Eye, Men

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• By ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make so much extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Planets, Starvation

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

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• She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

  J. Courtney Sullivan

  Men, Said, Seventies

  J. Courtney Sullivan (2009). “Commencement”, p.240, Vintage

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• Liberation, I guess, is everybody getting what they think they want, without knowing the whole truth. Or in other words, liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of. Here's to the eternal tandem.

  Robert Fulghum

  Thinking, Order, Knowing

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• And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation. Everything that mattered except one lousy picture was in the trash, but it felt so great. I started jogging, wanting to put even more distance between myself and school. It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

  John Green

  Distance, School, Perfect

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.228, A&C Black

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• That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.

  Ricky Gervais

  Dignity, Ends, Uncomfortable

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• Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?

  Andrea Dworkin

  Movement, Revolutionary

  Andrea Dworkin (2000). “Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Womens' Liberation”, p.248, Simon and Schuster

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• The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Memories, Giving, Childhood

  Herbert Marcuse (2015). “Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud”, p.19, Beacon Press

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• I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

  Lionel Shriver

  Drunk, Apathy, Care

  Lionel Shriver (2010). “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, p.174, Profile Books

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• And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.

  John Green

  Perfect, Upset, Leaving

  John Green (2013). “The John Green Collection”, p.572, Penguin

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• We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.

  Vandana Shiva

  Struggle, Our Generation, India

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• It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Taken, Heart

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

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• Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life. Maybe that's the thing with liberation. It comes at a price.

  Gayle Forman

  May, Honest

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

  Henry Miller

  Pain, Moving, Destiny

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• I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women's liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.

  Tom Glazer

  Song, Passion, Writing

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• This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade

  Paulo Freire

  Struggle, Reflection, Feminist

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.34, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• The true liberation, the true path to freedom, lay in the ability to forgive.

  Alyson Noel

  Forgiving, Path, Ability

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• When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Writing, Bird, Soul

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.90, Vintage

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• I would not question the sincerity of vegetarians who take little interest in Animal Liberation because they give priority to other causes; but when nonvegetarians say that "human problems come first" I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Giving, Support

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• When, for example, in the name of non-discrimination, people try to force the Catholic Church to change her position on homosexuality or the ordination of women, then that means that she is no longer allowed to live out her own identity and that, instead, an abstract, negative religion is being made into a tyrannical standard that everyone must follow. That is then seemingly freedom — for the sole reason that it is liberation from the previous situation.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Mean, Names, People

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• It's sadly predictable that the only way you can come up with a way to celebrate the liberation you feel at leaving the old system behind is by coming up with a "system of liberation", as if such a thing could exist - but that's what we can expect from those who have never known anything other than systems and systematizing, I guess.

  Mao Zedong

  Leaving, Way, Anarchy

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• In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.

  Salman Rushdie

  Country, Religious, America

  "The Iconoclast". Interview with Shikha Dalmia, reason.org. August 1, 2005.

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• But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a compromise with being, a concession to the blunder of creation itself. We should be able to do better, and we can. To have our egos killed off is second-best to killing off death and all the squalid byplay that flitters around it. So let all lands be small, and grower smaller and smaller until no lands are left where any human footstep need press itself upon the earth.

  Thomas Ligotti

  Land, Ego, Needs

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