The Freedom Manifesto

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.

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.

Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.

...[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.

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves

When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.

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.

It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.

The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.

Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.

Education is like pruning ; it wrecks the natural growth of the tree in favour of a form that is useful to commercial society

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.

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.

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.

We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.

It's senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .

Behaving as if you are better than others shows a lack of regard for other people.

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.

Screens make us into passive receivers. Smash the screen and find a pencil and a piece of paper instead.

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

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.

Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.

Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.

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.

It's easier to robe the poor.

It seems no body's business to try to better things

A diet of solely mental work is suffocating.

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.