The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. If you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.
1w ago
We are all of us the worse for too much liberty, and the better for a master hand over us at times; yet we struggle with all our might against that master hand when it is laid upon us.
"Freedom means you can talk to your friend, criticize the government, and then forget about it and go home. Where I'm from, if you criticize the government, you're not going to make it home."
2mo ago
The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.
3mo ago
The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.
4mo ago
The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are responsible for what we make of ourselves, yet we perpetually seek to escape this responsibility through bad faith and self-deception.
4mo ago
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is an affront.
Human behavior can never be made entirely rational, because the drive for freedom resists all systems. As Jack Nicholson says in Easy Rider, "Don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are."
6mo ago
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a form of rebellion.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.
And there is no setting more emblematic of freedom—and its discontents—than the campus, where tenure is supposed to protect the intellectual liberty of faculty and students living independently for the first time try on new ideas and identities.
He felt the new contract wasn't true to the promise of tech: "This isn't what we came to the Valley to do. We came to build tech that makes people free!"
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
