As Berdyaev puts it, we mean by one and the same word "either that initial and irrational liberty which is prior to good and evil and determines their choice, or else that intelligent freedom which is our final liberty in truth and goodness." By the first we mean freedom to direct one's own life, to choose between good and evil as one understands them by the second the freedom which consists in liberation from one's lower nature for the service of what is highest and best. Berdyaev makes an important distinction between two senses of the world freedom, between freedom as a means and freedom as an end.Daniel Akst, The Real ‘80s : If You Think It Was Just a Decade of Greed, You Missed the Revolution, Los Angeles Times, 13th November 1994.Think of gridlock on the freeway: everybody free to drive but nobody able to move. The odd thing about freedom is how, at the extreme, it comes to resemble its opposite.Aegisthus in Les mouches ( The Flies) by Jean-Paul Sartre, Act 2, 1943.He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work. A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd.John Adams Letter to Thomas Jefferson (15 July 1817).But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more. No such thing now exists but I hope it will exist. When people talk of the Freedom of Writing, Speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh.John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.External links A He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
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