“Our ideas can enslave or liberate us.”

Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party nomination (14 September 1960) · Address of John F. Kennedy upon Accepting the Liberal Party Nomination for President https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Liberal-Party-Nomination-NYC_19600914.aspx
1960

Simple Recipes for Joy (2014)

Chap. 1. The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism
Democracy's Discontent (1996)

“Animal Rights 2002” convention, 2002 June 30

“Western Civ,” p. 20.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
Context: Only the search back to the origins of one’s ideas in order to see the real arguments for them, before people became so certain of them that they ceased thinking about them at all, can liberate us. Our study of history has taught us to laugh at the follies of the whole past, the monarchies, oligarchies, theocracies, and aristocracies with the fanaticism for empire or salvation, once taken so seriously. But we have very few tools for seeing ourselves in the same way, as others will see us. Each age always conspires to make its own way of thinking appear to be the only possible or just way, and our age has the least resistance to the triumph of its own way. There is less real presence of respectable alternatives and less knowledge of the titanic intellectual figures who founded our way.

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. V.

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: We are all the aggregate of the ideas about us, including our own ideas about us. That is all that any of us can be considered as – units of information in a sea of information. When you get to a certain point, there is not much more to it than information. <!-- Which for our terms is practically synonymous with language, because that is the only way we understand information, in one sort of language or another.

Where are the War Poets? (1943)