Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.

Desire, ignorance, and inequality — this is the trinity of bondage.

(…) Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom.

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.

Freedom is the possibility of isolation... If you can't live alone, you were born a slave.

If you think that you are bound, you remain bound; you make your own bondage. If you know that you are free, you are free this moment. This is knowledge, knowledge of freedom. Freedom is the goal of all nature.

"We are told that we are "born free": untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman's blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures — and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices."

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Here's one who thinks he is the master of others, yet he is more enslaved than they are.

MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are."
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When I was about thirteen years old, and had succeeded in learning to read, every increase of knowledge, especially anything respecting the free states, was an additional weight to the almost intolerable burden of my thought, 'I am a slave for life'. To my bondage I could see no end. It was a terrible reality, and I shall never be able to tell how sadly that thought chafed my young spirit.

You will never understand freedom. You and your son will never understand true freedom. You think freedom is the throne of the world, where no one can alter your words, and no one can tell you what to do, and men live or die by the slight twitch of your eyebrow. That isn’t freedom. That is a life of fear.