Freedom!

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action-
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
- Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali - Verse 35)



Though now million voices through thy
                   mouth sonorous shout,
Though millions hands hold thy
                   trenchant sword-blades out,
Yet with all this power now,
                   Mother, wherefore powerless thous?
Holder thou of myriad might,
                   I salute thee, saviour bright,
Thou who dost all foes afright,
Mother, Hail!
- Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Anandamath, Part 1, Chapter 6. Song sang by Bhavan in the story)



Real freedom is freedom from all forms of self-centredness, from the grooves in which one ordinarily travels, from conventions by which one is bound, in short, freedom from the limitations of the self protecting self which feels insecure outside its walls.
- N Sri Ram.


Freedom is self-determination, not a reaction compelled or mechanical. He who is a slave to his passions, who is driven by habits of thoughts, emotion or action set up or contracted in ignorance, is not a free man.
-N Sri Ram.


The emancipation of our physical nature is in attaining health, of our social being in attaining goodness, and of our self in attaining freedom in love.
- Rabindranath Tagore.