Quotes About Freedom

The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?

Nothing is more unbearable, once has it, than freedom.

The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them--could not forgive.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.

To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free; it is only sporadically the home of the brave.

Nobody can stay in the Garden of Eden.

They were so free that they believed in nothing; and didn't realize that this illusion was their only truth and that they were doing exactly as they had been told.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!

Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope—in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me : I was to see to that.

The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors– through 400 years and at least three wars. Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now?

One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else—a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power. She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt's mind.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. I

I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.

Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.

They say the kids are dumb and so they're teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

He wasn't anybody's n*****. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country. You're suppose to be somebody's n*****. And if you're nobody's n*****, you're a bad n*****...