Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.

I am not bound to please thee with my answer.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

Our whole life is set up in the path of least resistance. We don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to feel discomfort. So the whole time, we’re living our lives in a very comfortable area. There’s no growth in that.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

If you’re too big to fit into fashion, then you just have to do your own fashion.

It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

I have made a few mistakes early on that I admit myself, and there have been times when I have gone over the top and done things that you shouldn’t do in international cricket, but that’s how you learn.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

But now, being a parent, I go home and see my son and I forget about any mistake I ever made or the reason I’m upset. I get home and my son is smiling or he comes running to me. It has just made me grow as an individual and grow as a man.

This young century will be liberty’s century.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

If I make a fool of myself, who cares? I’m not frightened by anyone’s perception of me.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‚Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!‘

I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

I don’t know if I’ve ever cared much what others think.

I just want to be myself.

Critics only make you stronger. You have to look at what they are saying as feedback. Sometimes the feedback helps, and other times, it’s just noise that can be a distraction.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

Ladies and gentlemen, god bless America – land of the free, home of the brave.

I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that – of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn’t an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There’s room for intuition.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.