Quote

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

— Jean Cocteau

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

Society just has a way of inhibiting you, which is good and bad.

— Barbara Park

Human beings want to be free and however long they may agree to stay locked up, to stay oppressed, there will come a time when they say 'That's it.' Suddenly they find themselves doing something that they never would have thought they would be doing, simply because of the human instinct that makes them turn their face towards freedom.

— Aung San Suu Kyi

In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.

— Michael Novak

We feel free... Now we are really self-reliant. This is the great advantage of teaching ourselves to become a free people, no longer one that always asks, 'Aid, aid, please.'

— Sukarno

Human beings have an instinct for freedom.

— Lupita Nyong'o

Free people make the only milieu possible in society for the full gift of one's self to church, state, and family. Free people enjoy and sustain and feel with one another because they live for one another. The paths of life are intermingled lives.

— Haniel Long

The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.

— Ron Paul

Sometimes, the thing that ties you down sets you free.

— Kirk Douglas

✗Opposing Perspectives

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

— Robert Frost

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.

— Michael Ignatieff