Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.

He who flees will fight again.

If one has deserted the world, but one thought still inclines to worldliness, he is not considered as free man nor an ascetic; his inner defilement still survives.

I flee who chases me and chase who flees me.

no man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure; but having failed in one location and having been ejected, it is possible that in the next he will be a little wiser.

What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?

It seems that if I am afraid, then I am “stuck” with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it.

One can run away from anything but oneself.

This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.

long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom.

Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers, the men flee the tigers, and the tigers seek the men.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.

Those tied by a rope may squirm; they may try to break free and run away, but those tied by emotions go nowhere, even if they are left completely free.

It came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself. ~ Ch. 25