Free Spirit Quotes

“The Talmud says that when two intellects debate they sharpen each other like iron against iron.”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid

“What if we were all just individuals who should be judged by the content of our character?”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid

“That’s really what the Romans would do. They’d come in first under a white flag. As simple merchants wanting to trade. Then they brought in roads, then settlers, then public works and temples, then armies for protection. The next thing you knew, you had to pay them taxes, bow down before their gods, and sacrifice all the freedoms that made your people special. That’s what they called the Roman Peace. It was peace as long as you did everything they told you to do.”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid

“Violence wasn’t a bad thing when it was brandished against the System.”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid

“And popsicles. Not the crappy kind we made in San Francisco by freezing apple juice on a plastic spoon. No, the genuine artificial article, glowing in unnatural colors and brimming with ingredients like FD&C Yellow No. 5 and enough preservatives to embalm a mammoth.”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid

“when I learned of the festive holiday of Thanksgiving that apparently everybody celebrated. I returned the next day preaching about Native American genocide. “Did you know,” I asked the art teacher, “that Indians to this day are still being driven off of their land? The government took away their forests and meadows and now they want their rocks. For the uranium. So we can make atomic bombs to kill every last woman, man, and child.”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid

“Do I like him? There’s nobody there to like or not like.”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid

“Who’s your mommy?” “Her name is Claudia,” I said, “but I’m not supposed to call her Mom because that name is too limiting. She’s more than a mother. She’s a full person named Claudia.”
― Joshua Safran, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid