"Freedom from is ordinary, mundane. Man has always tried to be free from things. It is not creative. It is the negative aspect of freedom.

"Freedom for is creativity. You have a certain vision that you would like to materialize and you want freedom for it.

"Freedom from is always from the past, and freedom for is always for the future.

"Freedom for is a spiritual dimension because you are moving into the unknown and perhaps, one day, into the unknowable. It will give you wings.

"Freedom from, at the most, can take away your handcuffs. It is not necessarily beneficial – and the whole of history is a proof of it. People have never thought of the second freedom that I am insisting on; they have only thought of the first – because they don't have the insight to see the second. The first is visible: chains on their feet, handcuffs on their hands. They want to be free from them, but then what? What are you going to do with your hands? You may even repent that you asked for freedom from.

"It happened in the castle of the Bastille – I have told you – in the French Revolution it was the most famous French prison, it was reserved only for those who were sentenced to live in jail for their whole lives. So one entered the Bastille alive but never came out alive – only the dead bodies came out.

"And when they put on the handcuffs, the chains, they locked them and threw the keys in a well which was inside the Bastille – because they were not needed. Those locks would not be opened again so what would be their use?

"There were more than five thousand people. What is the use of keeping five thousand peoples' keys and maintaining them unnecessarily?

"Once they have entered their dark cells, they have entered them forever.

"The French revolutionaries necessarily thought that the first thing that had to be done was to free the people from the Bastille.

"It is inhuman to put somebody for any act whatsoever into prison in a dark cell just to wait for his death which might come fifty years afterwards, sixty years afterwards. Sixty years of waiting is an immense torture to the soul. It is not punishment, it is vengeance, revenge, because these people disobeyed the law. There is no balance between their acts and the punishment."