Wherever on this planet ideals of personal freedom and dignity apply there you will find the cultural inheritance of England.

It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.

I have always that there ought to be some kind of mandatory national service not necessarily in the military but to show everybody that freedom isn't free that everybody has an obligation to the nation as a community.

Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.

Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise and take chances and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz... And that is really the idea of democracy - freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want.

With Napster and the sharing of music of course there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.

History is full of examples of people who clamp down after they began to enjoy too much freedom. Freedom can lead to instability anarchy and confusion. So there can be a moral counter-revolution.

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

I don't think that there is absolute freedom of the press. We operate under laws - against libel for instance. The idea that there is some absolute press freedom is kind of a myth.

I think there is a heritage which I'm proud of which is a fight for democracy a fight for social justice a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life fighting for his principles for democracy or for his country. And my father twice.

Life is a very orderly thing but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

Our Founders warned against this. They said don't... that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they um get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government liberty is done freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there.

With one man there was a freedom and liberation. That was with Michael Hutchence my partner in life.

There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning when I went to sleep at night and that went on for eight years.

Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them at the end of 19 years suited to be upright trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

I mean there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the E.U. between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see.

There's a hell of a lot of freedom in this rock and roll circus... it's where all the freaks go - it's the environment for me.

China has not established the rule of law and if there is a power above the law there is no social justice. Everybody can be subjected to harm. I'm just a citizen: my life is equal in value to any other. But I'm thankful that when I lost my freedom so many people shared feelings and put such touching effort into helping me.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces and that cure is freedom.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

There's a freedom to being young that is harder to come by as time goes on.