The Freedom Manifesto Quotes

“In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since. ”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Education is like pruning ; it wrecks the natural growth of the tree in favour of a form that is useful to commercial society”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“Career is just posh slavery.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant and nothing matters. All of man’s striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“It's senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Behaving as if you are better than others shows a lack of regard for other people.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution. Once each of us recognizes our own freedom and our own responsibility, then the chains that bind us will fall away.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Being safe is fiction.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“Screens make us into passive receivers. Smash the screen and find a pencil and a piece of paper instead.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“One of the symptoms of the approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important & that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. Bertrand Russell”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“take responsibility for our lives and recognize that we choose how we react to situations and that we can choose to be free if we so wish.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“Thus it is that the Internet, once heralded as an exciting new medium of communication, is now little more than a vast mail-order catalogue.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste

“It's easier to robe the poor.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“It seems no body's business to try to better things”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“A diet of solely mental work is suffocating.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto

“How much more fun life must have been when we went around on horses, chatting to strangers, leaning over gates, leaping over fences, singing with joy, being at one with nature, its animals and its weather.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto