When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True freedom cannot be hierarchical or conditional; it must be actively practiced.
In this quote, Faulkner emphasizes that genuine freedom is not based on social or hierarchical structures that dictate levels of equality, nor is it merely claimed without action. Instead, he advocates for the idea that freedom should be a practice that everyone engages in, suggesting that to truly be free, individuals must actively embody and enact their freedom in everyday life.
Themes
FreedomEqualityPracticeHierarchyPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech on civil rights to underline the essence of active participation in freedom.
More from William Faulkner
All quotes →I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....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 FaulknerRead
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
William FaulknerRead
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