I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

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.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I’ve had everything pierced at some point.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

I have always been that girl in the back who doesn’t say anything.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

I am who I am and I say what I think. I’m not putting a face on for the record.

Let us ask ourselves, ‚What kind of people do we think we are?‘ And let us answer, ‚Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.‘

Freedom lies in being bold.

All of my music is honest.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

The expression a woman wears on her face is far more important than the clothes she wears on her back.

For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

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

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

The tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

The only answer to fear is faith in God, knowing He loves you unconditionally and individually.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

I just know that I’m a fan of all different kinds of genres. You’re supposed to be free doing music, and that’s how I feel.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Rather be dead than cool.

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

When you’re just like everybody else, you’ve nothing to offer other than your conformity.

I don’t have to be what you want me to be.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Facts, like people, want to be free – and when they’re free, liberty is usually around the corner.

I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.