Quotes About Freedom

In the Seventeenth Century a man feared to go to Mass lest the Judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favor of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.

Some Generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment... In the Seventeenth Century a man feared to go to Mass lest the Judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favor of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.

You can't be free if the cost of being you is too high.

Money is simply a tool to give you choices.

She was responsible for the things she chose. That's all. She almost managed a tiny smile. It was simultaneously an incredible responsibility and almost nothing at all, she thought wonderingly.

liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion

If any man, so lost in his strength and prowess, pays you no respect Ã¢â'¬â€just pay him back . . . Do what you like. Whatever warms your heart.

These evolutionary achievements were incremental steps toward multicellularity. Colonies of single-celled organisms could be sieved apart, then, if given freedom, were (and still are) able to reconstruct their shattered community.

The catalysts for transformation would be three: freedom to escape group boundaries; ideas; and the games subcultures were about to learn to play. We'll see in coming chapters how this triad altered utterly the workings of mass mind.

Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.

When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.

We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.

The country therefore was not "born free" but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.

People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave.

WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules.

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle…. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.

Another black woman, Margaret Wright, said she was not fighting for equality with men if it meant equality in the world of killing, the world of competition. I don't want to compete on no damned exploitative level. I don't want to exploit nobody. . . . I want the right to be black and me. . . .

His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, "What are you doing in there?" it was reported that Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there?

I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.

Lying there, interrogated by the governor of Virginia, Brown said: "You had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. . . . You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled,—this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.

Aldous Huxley: "Liberties are not given, they are taken.