Quotes by British Authors - Page 657

Processes of rationalization and disenchantment engender a shift from a social order founded upon value-rational beliefs and governed through charismatic and traditional forms of authority, to an order ruled by the force of instrumental reason and dominated by new forms of institutional bureaucracy. This movement results in the depersonalization of the social world: instrumental calculation steadily suppresses the passionate pursuit of ultimate values, and bureaucracy reduces the scope for individual initiative and personal fulfillment... instrumental reason... is not only tied to the devaluation or disenchantment of the highest and most sublime values and ideals, but places important limits on the scope for individual autonomy and freedom in the modern world.
Nicholas Gane
The time had finally come when she would have to accept the full power of the Starwife. No longer could she be just Ysabelle. Now she had a land to govern and all the daunting responsibilities that that entailed. The liberty she had experienced since the night she had escaped from the Ring of Banbha seemed to vanish. She was left stripped of her freedom, and only long years of a lonely reign stretched out before her.
Robin Jarvis
A year ago I was being kept in this cell and I didn't want to kill anyone, not even the people who held me prisoner. I just wanted to escape, just wanted freedom. And now I have that; I have my freedom.
Sally Green
Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind’s ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free.
Neel Burton
Through knowledge we gain power over our lives. With options we have possibility. With acceptance we find a new freedom.
Lucy H. Pearce
Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
Friedrich A. Hayek
You don't need planning permission to build castles in the sky.
Banksy
Shame internalized can lead to agony. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.
Jon Ronson
To die hating them, that was freedom
George Orwell
I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, ''Of couse I am - sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.
Aleister Crowley
It’s so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen… She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.
Amanda Craig
People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!
Henry James
Love builds a bridge. Hate builds a wall.
Alan Dapre
Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.
Muriel Spark
Those who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
Freidrich Hayek
I think I know the delights of freedom
Charles Dickens
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.
C.S. Lewis
You let go. It's as simple and as complicated as Antonia had told me. You cry. You come. You sing. You laugh. You scream. You let go. No one needs to hang on to a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses. I looked back up at the sky, blinking at the lustrous beauty of the ascending and departing demons. They formed an alphabet I was beginning to learn to read. They were fire in the sky.
Graham Joyce
But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law.
H.G.Wells
The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.
Michael Oakeshott
Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.
Iris Murdoch
I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.
W Somerset Maugham
I don't know where I belong, so I'm free. No one's got a hold on me.
Philip Pullman
... freedom is the knowledge of necessity and there is no wealth but life. When you understand that you understand everything.
Olivia Manning
She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four. 'What have you been doing all this time?' she wanted to ask, but instead she said, 'What brought you to England?''There was a man,' Paola said. 'When the man left, I decided to stay.''An Italian man?'Barely perceptibly, Paola nodded.'He had a job here. He is an -' She paused. '- aeronautical engineer. After a year he had to go home.'Solly was seething with questions. It was strange: in Paola's presence she felt herself to be a failure, yet a part of her believed that a woman of thirty-four with no husband or children was the greatest failure of all. It was a kind of unstoppable need for resolution that grew from her like ivy over the prospect of freedom and tried to strangle it. She couldn't bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without ends. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own? She sat there in her white sweater, delicately eating. Solly, a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left, sat opposite her, impatient for more.
Rachel Cusk
The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.
Rachel Cusk
Until you have not been free, you cannot understand what freedom means.
Claire North
The truth is, he was so glad at being free from his long enchantment that all dangers seemed a game in comparison. But the rest found it an eerie journey.
C.S. Lewis
We seek no treasure, we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his god, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble labourer returned from his work when the day is don, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.
Winston S. Churchill
You need to be outdoors. Away from here. You need a holiday.
Fennel Hudson
Independence Day is a day of truth,It stands for us,Both me and you,It gives us hope,To fight on days,When there are others against us,What more can I say.It gives us glory,Our land to share,With each other,We shall not despair.The land of freedom,Our liberty tall,She shines her torch,For one and all.The fourth of July,Is our special day,It's when we came of age,That's all I'll say.God Bless!
Anthony T.Hincks
Find a part of yourself hidden in the twilight.
Fennel Hudson
We have the freedom of choice, to choose what’s right.
Fennel Hudson
Enjoy the contented silence.
Fennel Hudson
If this is freedom, do I want it?
Kerry Drewery
I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than I had ever been.
V.S. Naipaul
Our children are interested in the BIG picture. That is where the deep natural learning seems to get done. It is totally opposite to everything I have ever learnt at school.
Lehla Eldridge
Slavery was never abolished.It was just renamed.
Anthony T.Hincks
on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.
Chris Cleave
Man is everywhere in chains, and his chains will not be broken till he feels that it is degrading to be a bondsman, whether to an individual or to a State. The disease of civilization is not so much the material poverty of the many as the decay of the spirit of freedom and self-confidence. The revolt that will change the world will spring, not from the benevolence that breeds "reform", but from the will to be free. Men will act together in the full consciousness of their mutual dependence; but they will act for themselves. Their liberty will not be given them from above; they will take it on their own behalf.
G. D. H. Cole
Have we freed this man or cursed him?" he wondered aloud."Freedom is never a curse, brother," Thirty-four insisted. "But it is often a hard road.
Anthony Ryan
Without trade the world will become what it was once—a hell where only the strongest arm and the heaviest lash was law. The meek will never inherit the earth. Aye, but at least they can be protected by law to live out their lives as they wish.
James Clavell
When we discover who we are We will be free
Mimi Novic
Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.
Patrick O'Brian
I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.
Jeanette Winterson
It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art. Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill. ... The artist is the only free man.
W Somerset Maugham
...the Pope vigorously upholds the real power of redemption to liberate the human heart from the domination of lust, calling men and women to a new "ethos.
Christopher West
The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning.
David F. Ford
And right action is freedom from past and future also.For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. "The Dry Salvages
T.S Eliot
For, like the wind, the sun, or the flowing river, like a soaring man-of-war or a beetle under a stone, like a spider at a web or a crab scuttling sideways across a shore, Nimrod was free.
Andrea Levy
Maybe I should be still; accept my fate. But I have tasted freedom, known love – I have had choice and learnt what it is to have a human heart, not just a compliant one.
Dianna Hardy
Judgment is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all? To prohibit what they think pernicious is not claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, although fallible, of acting on their conscientious conviction. If we were never to act on our opinions, because those opinions ‘lay be wrong, we should leave all our interests uncared for, and all our duties unperformed. An objection which applies to all conduct can be no valid objection to any conduct in particular.
John Stuart Mill
In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we've done, and they will say 'do not despair, do not yield...march straightforward.
Winston S. Churchill
Freedom is not to defy, it is to co-exist. It is a challenge for the imagination
Ilyas Kassam
A kite can't really fly free,that's just an expression. In order to soar high in the sky the string of a kite needs to be anchored. If the string breaks the kite drops back to the ground. The kite's freedom depends on it not being as free as he thinks it is.
Simon Napier-Bell
If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant pastSecurity in human systems we're told will always always lastEmotions are the sail and blind faith is the mastWithout the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere
Sting
E: When one has at last reached freedom, can one even contemplate going back?HC: But if it is not possible to go back, or to choose to go back, then it is not freedom!~Ericsson; Hilary Craven
Agatha Christie
The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.
George Orwell
I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.
Samuel Johnson
Now it was done. He was free of Xanth forever. Free to make his own life, without being ridiculed or mothered or tempted. Free to be himself.Bink put his face in his hands and cried.
Piers Anthony