"If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails"
About this Quote
Freedom is being pitched here not as a mood, but as a contract you sign with yourself. Buscaglia, a warm-blooded popular philosopher of the late-20th-century self-help moment, builds the line like a gentle ultimatum: enslavement isn’t only something done to us; it’s also something we cooperate with when comfort, habit, or fear feels easier than agency.
The intent is motivational, but the mechanism is sharper than it looks. “If we wish” frames liberation as desire before it’s strategy, pointing to the awkward truth that many people crave relief more than they crave change. Then comes the pivot: “we must choose.” Not dream, not hope, not wait for permission. The subtext is that freedom has to be practiced, often against the grain of our own routines and excuses. “Responsibility” is the price tag he refuses to hide. Buscaglia implicitly rejects the fantasy of consequence-free autonomy: you don’t get to be free and still outsource the hard parts of living - decisions, boundaries, accountability - to employers, partners, systems, or fate.
Context matters: Buscaglia’s work emerged amid postwar American abundance and its private discontents, when “freedom” was a national slogan but many lives were shaped by conformity, corporate hierarchy, and emotional restraint. In that climate, calling responsibility the twin of freedom is a corrective to both victimhood and simplistic bootstrap mythology. The line lands because it tells a flattering truth (you have choice) and an unflattering one (you’re on the hook), in the same breath.
The intent is motivational, but the mechanism is sharper than it looks. “If we wish” frames liberation as desire before it’s strategy, pointing to the awkward truth that many people crave relief more than they crave change. Then comes the pivot: “we must choose.” Not dream, not hope, not wait for permission. The subtext is that freedom has to be practiced, often against the grain of our own routines and excuses. “Responsibility” is the price tag he refuses to hide. Buscaglia implicitly rejects the fantasy of consequence-free autonomy: you don’t get to be free and still outsource the hard parts of living - decisions, boundaries, accountability - to employers, partners, systems, or fate.
Context matters: Buscaglia’s work emerged amid postwar American abundance and its private discontents, when “freedom” was a national slogan but many lives were shaped by conformity, corporate hierarchy, and emotional restraint. In that climate, calling responsibility the twin of freedom is a corrective to both victimhood and simplistic bootstrap mythology. The line lands because it tells a flattering truth (you have choice) and an unflattering one (you’re on the hook), in the same breath.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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