Quotes About Freedom

If you don't have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught.

It was either live in the shadow of the fear all our lives or, once and for all, break free of it and have all the things we wanted. That was the whole of it. We had to be free of the fear so that we could think of tomorrow, a tomorrow we had been afraid to look into because it looked so much like yesterday.

You are not a prisoner of your past; you are the architect of your future.

Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party.

play The Tempest

Fifty-eight years after he was first jailed for the most heinous crimes ever committed by a juvenile, Jesse Harding Pomeroy was free at last.

Islam was no longer a straitjacket into which I forced myself, nor a nonnative language I learned from others around me, but a grammar through which I vowed to write my own stories.

My name is whaddya care My home is anywhere People say I'm awful dumb So I thought to you I'd come

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free.

My soul an't yours, Mas'r! You haven't bought it,—ye can't buy it! It's been bought and paid for, by one that is able to keep it.

So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master -- so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil -- so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.

All men are free and equal, in the grave

Is there anything in it glorious and dear for a nation, that is not also glorious and dear for a man? What is freedom to a nation, but freedom to the individuals in it?

If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o'clock till morning to make good your escape,—how fast could you walk?

Liberty! -- Electric word!

To him, it is the right of a man to be a man, and not a brute; the right to call the wife of his bosom his wife, and to protect her from lawless violence; the right to protect and educate his child; the right to have a home of his own, a religion of his own, a character of his own, unsubject to the will of another.

Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that he may bring out his sister, or mother, or wife.

We ought to be free to meet and mingle, --to rise by our individual worth, without any consideration of caste or color; and they who deny us this right are false to their own professed principals of human equality.

Perhaps the mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of Kentucky.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

My country again! Mr. Wilson, you have a country; but what country have I, or any one like me, born of slave mothers? What laws are there for us? We don't make them,—we don't consent to them,—we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down.

It's a free country, sir; the man's mine, and I do what I please with him,—that's it!