Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard O'Brien

Freedom gets treated like a possession, something you can “have” once you’ve checked the right civic boxes. Richard O’Brien’s line punctures that complacency with a performer’s instinct for the trapdoor: the difference between freedom as an inspiring concept and freedom as a lived condition. The phrasing does a lot of work. “Even though we know” implies literacy without liberation; we can recite the rhetoric, celebrate the holidays, quote the manifestos, and still move through a world rigged with invisible rails. Then comes the sly turn: “as free as we think we are.” The target isn’t some obvious dictator; it’s our own self-image.

Coming from O’Brien - forever associated with The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its cult refusal of respectable norms - the subtext lands in the space between performance and policing. Rocky Horror sells transgression as joy, a night where people try on identities and desires that daytime culture quietly discourages. O’Brien’s point: the cage isn’t only laws, it’s scripts. Gender expectations, class codes, the demand to be “normal,” even the marketplace’s curated menu of “choices” that feel rebellious while staying profitable.

The quote also reads like a backstage note about consent and control: the systems that advertise freedom often survive by keeping us busy, amused, and certain we’re immune. O’Brien isn’t denying freedom exists; he’s warning that the most effective constraint is the one that lets you believe you’re already free.