Freedom – she understood now – was something so long lost among humans that they had forgotten what it felt like. Bend to your labours! Grasp those coins! Keep the doors locked and fires raging to empty the shadows behind you! Make your brothers and sisters kneel before you, to serve your pleasures. Are you free? You don’t remember the truth of what once was – of what you all so willingly surrendered.

Its not until you lose everything that you can truly apreciate everything

We forget what we already have, don

So often we fail to acknowledge what we have because we’re so concerned about what we want.

Here’s a curious fact about human beings: we have a really hard time realizing that something isn’t there.

Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.

For it falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
While it was ours.

Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it.

We didn't love freedom enough.

it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it, to know what true freedom is

...for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.

Freedom is an illusion, but a valuable one.

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books.