Quote

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

William Faulkner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Faulkner
Age: 64 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 25
Died: 1962
Died: July 6
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New Albany
Mississippi
William Cuthbert Faulkner
William Falkner
William Cuthbert Falkner
System
Hierarchy
Liberty
Established
Practice
Claim
Freedom
Equality
Free
Claims
Cannot
Degrees
Caste
Must
Choose
Castes
Like
Military
Rank

More quotes by William Faulkner

Image
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
William Faulkner
Image
I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
William Faulkner
Image
You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
William Faulkner
Image
Our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere -- systems political or religious or racial or national -- will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
William Faulkner
Image
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
William Faulkner
Image
A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
William Faulkner
Image
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
William Faulkner
Image
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
William Faulkner
Image
And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
William Faulkner
Image
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner
Image
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
William Faulkner
Image
People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
William Faulkner
Image
Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
William Faulkner
Image
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
William Faulkner
Image
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
William Faulkner
Image
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
William Faulkner
Image
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
William Faulkner
Image
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
William Faulkner
Image
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
William Faulkner
Image
True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
William Faulkner