“Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.”
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
"Bird on the Wire"
Songs from a Room (1969)
Is God a Taoist? (1977) http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
“Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.”
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
"Bird on the Wire"
Songs from a Room (1969)
Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology
In other words, wickedness appears to be something which is irreducibly given: the person in question can never change it, outgrow it via his ultimate moral development.
186-187
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
“The natural state of man is to want to be free. To have opportunities. To have choices.”
Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense
On Arab Spring, Rumsfeld, that he wasn't surprised by popular uprisings of Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/03/08/rumsfeld.interview/index.html March 9, 2011. <br class="br">2010s
John Buchan book The Power-House
Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 8 "The Power-House"
Context: I am a sceptic about most things... but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.
“We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author
An ironic statement which Singer made in many interviews over many years; here quoted in "Isaac Singer’s Promised City" http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_3_urbanities-isaac.html City Journal (Summer 1997) <br class="br">Variants or variant translations:<br>We must believe in free will — we have no other choice.<br>You must believe in free will; there is no choice.<br>We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice. <br class="br">This makes more sense if you consider the statement "we must believe in free will; we have no [other logical] choice"
Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer
Re: The Next Generation of Lisp Programmers http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e239591cbc9eb18d (Usenet article). <br class="br">Usenet articles, Miscellaneous
Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer
In Munshi Premchand:Biography, 10 December 2013, Internet Media Data Base http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0695919/bio,
Lena Horne (1917–2010) American singer, actress, civil rights activist and dancer
Lena Horne (ca. 1997) in: Susan Ratcliffe (2012) Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, p. 208
Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor
In "Music in Aspic," Harper's Magazine (October 1939) and A Smattering of Ignorance (1940); as quoted in "Lightning Wit Plays On American Musical Scene; Oscar Levant Answers Unspoken Request for 'Information, Please' With Uncensored Comments on Exalted Persons" by Ray C. B. Brown, in The Washington Post (January 14, 1940), p. E4