Quotes About Freedom

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

We Negroes love our country. We fought for it. We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.

Every tone [of the songs of the slaves] was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

Along the wide straight road he pushed the car well over eighty miles an hour and kept the tachometre needle flickering just below the start of the red band.

We have a belief that we need not believe in, no dogmas, no ritual, no mythology, no church, no priest, no holy book--what a relief!

Slaves dream of freedom, commoners dream of becoming kings, what do kings dream of?

I am tired of ruling over slaves.

All religions must be tolerated... for... every man must get to heaven his own way.

To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.

Every time we take a step we're surrounded by the ideological birds of prey who feed on our possibilities, fill themselves with concepts of our desires and reenslave us with beautiful combinations of words which seem to depict the world we failed to realize.

The every day activity of slaves reproduces slavery

I have the freedom to do what I want... bright people to talk to every day.

Having grown up in Bombay, from the day you're born, you have absolute freedom to choose who you want to be.

Marriage is like a beleaguered fortress: those who are outside want to get in, and those inside want to get out

Pies pa' que los quiero, si tengo alas pa' volar