Quotes About Freedom

Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.

Every thinking human is a turbulent little pocket of supernatural freedom-from-causality, working against the constant resistance of an otherwise mathematically determinist world.

But maybe it's better to be an outlaw with purpose than a citizen without.

few slaves had been captured;

Tim Vicary Historical Novels Nobody's Slave

chained in the

I meant to slip away, he said, busking it now.

He was scarcely sixteen years of age when he left his father's home, And through Australia's sunny clime a bushranger did roam. He robbed those wealthy squatters, their stock he did destroy, And a terror to Australia was the wild Colonial boy.

The sea is one rare wild card left in the homogenous suburban life.

We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn't have things to do like people in the city. We couldn't catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We'd walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers.

It's having the choices that kills a man. It's the best and the worst. You get to choose and you get to regret. Almost guaranteed to bugger it up. And sometimes not.

What whites have rarely had to think about—because being the dominant group, we are so used to having our will done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human.

After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality.

You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose.

We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation.

We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.15

But to argue, like Filmer, Tribe, Sunstein, and Bork, that government comes first, and that it gives people freedom when it wills, and for its own purposes, is, as Locke concluded, the same as saying "that no man is born free.

Noble as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were, it was obvious before the ink was dry that they clashed with a central fact of everyday life in America: slavery.

Although parts of the amendment still provide real security for individual freedom today, the wrong done in that 1873 precedent still hampers protections for liberty today.

A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which the slave may be whipped at any time," wrote Douglass

The profession of political science, he claimed, had "abandoned" the Declaration's premise "that liberty is a natural right," and had come to hold that freedom is created by government as a sort of privilege: "rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in

Holmes's experience in the war taught him not that all people have a right to freedom, but rather that claims about right and wrong are really only illusions.67 Ethical principles, he believed, are subjective, emotional commitments that cannot be judged right or wrong. Ideas such as justice or moral good are only the expressions of arbitrary personal preferences and are no more rational than a person's preference for one kind of beer over

His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would "spoil the best nigger in the world," and "unfit him to be a slave.

Hugh Auld was wise to fear slave literacy. Reading could kindle in a slave a desire for learning and for a personal future, thus undermining slavery's consistent effort to stamp out any sense of self-worth.