Quotes About Freedom

I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside. I want to reach out and touch the plains, Where the streets have no names.

I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.

notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe.

During the whole of the Reconstruction period our people throughout the South looked to the Federal Government for everything, very much as a child looks to its mother. This was not unnatural. The central government gave them freedom, and the whole Nation had been enriched for more than two centuries by the labour of the Negro.

The whole machinery of slavery was so constructed as to cause labour, as a rule, to be looked upon as a badge of degradation, of inferiority. Hence labour was something that both races on the slave plantation sought to escape.

I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time.

In the earlier days of freedom almost every coloured man who learned to read would receive "a call to preach" within a few days after he began reading.

The Negro is better off in his family, in the first place, because, even when his home is little more than a primitive one-room cabin, he is at least living in the open country in contact with the pure air and freedom of the woods, and not in the crowded village where the air and the soil have for centuries been polluted with the accumulated refuse and offscourings of a crowded and slatternly population.

The idea, however, was too prevalent that, as soon as one secured a little education, in some unexplainable way he would be free from most of the hardships of the world, and, at any rate, could live without manual labour.

Thanks to Azazel a man is able to practice arts and crafts and defend his home. Thanks to Azazel woman was transformed from a submissive bearer of children into an equal human being possessing the freedom to choose—whether to be ugly or beautiful, whether to be a mother or an Amazon, to live for the sake of her family or the whole of mankind.

Gentlemen living after me!     Since you are reading this little letter of mine, I have already departed from you and gone on to learn the secret of death, which remains concealed from your eyes behind seven seals. I am free, while you must carry on living in torment and fear.

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.

Don't ignore the past, but deal with it, on your own pace. Once you deal with it, you are free of it and you are free to embrace your life and be a happy loving person because if you don't, the past will come back to haunt and keep coming back to haunt you.

You are eternity's hostageA captive of time.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.

We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares more about than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. — John Stuart Mill

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. — George Orwell, 1984

To say that a government that serves the people is allowed to disarm the people is a simple contradiction in terms and a legal impossibility. — Donald M. Smith

It is the life of democracy to favor equality.

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature has set none.

It is not meet that the strong, free limbs of manhood should be fettered by the silken threads of ceremony.

Better freedom with a crust, than slavery with every luxury.