Liberation Quotes - Page 17

• If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity.

  Asger Jorn

  Art, Often Is, Important

  "Asger Jorn" by Arken Museum of Modern Art, (p. 162), 2002.

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• The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.

  Paulo Freire

  Strive, Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, Oppressors

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.32, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Prepare, and be forewarned in time. If thou hast tried and failed, O dauntless fighter, yet lose not courage: fight on, and to the charge return again and yet again...
  Remember, thou that fightest for man's liberation, each failure is success, and each sincere attempt wins its rewards in time.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Life, Freedom, Fighting

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• When one begins to reflect on philosophy—then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea—which ceaselessly drives us inward in all directions. The decision to do philosophy—to seek philosophy is the act of self-liberation—the thrust toward ourselves.

  Novalis

  Philosophy, Ideas, Self

  Novalis (1997). “Novalis: Philosophical Writings”, p.48, SUNY Press

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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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• 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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• The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

  Adrienne Rich

  Two, Phrases, Movement

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• Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

  Beryl Markham

  Character, Yield, Hands

  McDougal, Beryl Markham (1997). “West with the Night”, McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin

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• The God of Exodus is the God of history and of political liberation more than he is the God of nature.

  Gustavo Gutiérrez

  Political, Exodus

  Gustavo Gutiérrez (1973). “A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation”

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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 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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• The total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African Socialist Government must be the primary objective of all Black revolutionaries throughout the world. It is an objective which when achieved, will bring about the fulfillment of the aspirations of Africans and people of African descent everywhere. It will at the same time advance the triumph of the international socialist revolution.

  Kwame Nkrumah

  Socialist Government, People, Black

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• I take very seriously the sense of our living these days in a global neighborhood. And the first sensible thing to do in such circumstances, as well as one of the most rewarding things, is to go and meet the neighbors, find out who they are, and what they think and feel. So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.

  Pico Iyer

  Adventure, Responsibility, Thinking

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• How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be 'hosts' of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.

  Paulo Freire

  Discovery, Long, Impossible

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.48, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit , but as a limiting situation which they can transform.

  Paulo Freire

  Struggle, Reality, Order

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.35, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• The desire for a nonviolent and cooperative world is the healthiest of all psychological manifestations. This is the overarching principle of liberation and revolution. Undoubtedly, it seems the highest order of contradiction that, in order to achieve nonviolence, we must first break with it in overcoming its root causes. Therein lies our only hope.

  Ward Churchill

  Lying, Order, Roots

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• A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man. If he's not about liberation, if he's not about struggle, if he ain't about building a strong Black family, if he ain't about building a strong Black nation, then he ain't about nothing.

  Assata Shakur

  Strong, Struggle, Men

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• The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked-up with the total liberation of the African Continent

  Kwame Nkrumah

  Ghana, Independence, African Continent

  Kwame Nkrumah (1968). “Dark days in Ghana”, Lawrence & Wishart

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• Yoko [Ono] was well into liberation before I met her. She'd had to fight her way through a man's world - the art world is completely dominated by men - so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met.

  John Lennon

  Art, Fighting, Men

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation - that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness.

  Max Stirner

  Self, I Can

  Max Stirner (1915). “The Ego and His Own”

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• We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

  Robert Wright

  Mean, Trying, Peculiar

  "The Moral Animal". Book by Robert Wright, www.wired.com. 1994.

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• Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.

  Immanuel Kant

  Knowledge, Men, Self

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• But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or sub oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradiction of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them to be men is to be oppressors

  Paulo Freire

  Struggle, Men, Existential

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.45, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Jesus Christ and all the writers of the New Testament call us to break free of mammon lust and live in joyous trust...They point us toward a way of living in which everything we have we receive as a gift, and everything we have is cared for by God, and everything we have is available to others when it is right and good. This reality frames the heart of Christian simplicity. It is the means of liberation and power to do what is right and to overcome the forces of fear and avarice.

  Richard J. Foster

  Christian, Jesus, Heart

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• The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual liberation, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Believe, Worry, Feminism

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1983). “Family politics: love and power on an intimate frontier”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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