Quotes About Freedom

You haven't lived until you've sailed

To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me.

If you think I'm putting my bra back on for this bullshit, you are so sorely mistaken.

It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.

What ultimately did me in was the self-adhesive condom. Putting it on was no problem, but its removal qualified as what, in certain cultures, is known as a bris. Wear it once, and you'll need a solid month to fully recover. It will likely be a month in which you'll weigh the relative freedom of peeing in your pants against the unsightly discomfort of a scab-covered penis, ultimately realizing that, in terms of a convenient accessory

The guy in the T-shirt that pictures a semiautomatic rifle above the message COME AND TAKE IT, the one in fatigues buying two twelve-packs of beer and a tub of rice pudding, didn't necessarily vote Republican. He could have just stayed home on Election Day and force-fed the women he holds captive in the crawl space beneath his living room.

If you think I'm putting my bra back on for this bullshit, you

could it be???? Timothy Speaks, who had so many pierced holes in his ears you could have torn the lobe right off, effortlessly ripped it loose the same way you might separate a stamp from a sheet.

We passed a gun shop advertising a Blowout Sale. While listening to a country music station,we heard a talk/song narrated by our flag. I flew proudly at Iwo Jima and the blustering deserts of Kuwait, anywhere freedom is threatened, you will find me.

I think we've both seen this coming for a long… time. The only question left is… what are we going to do about it? Oh, baby, let's run wild.

There were better things to do with life than giving in to the peer pressure of mortality.

Siempre quiso ver en la excitada modernidad de aquellos años en Madrid la explosión de un montón de reprimidos llegados de provincias que en la capital podían arrancase la máscara sin que sus padres, ni sus parientes, ni sus vecinos del pueblo pudieran verlos. El anonimato de la gran ciudad es lo único que nos permitió ser libres.

Los gobiernos no pueden dar nada que no les hayan arrancado antes a sus ciudadanos.

Es interesante aceptar sin traumas la idea de decepcionar a los demás, de no hacer lo que esperan de ti.

Tardé tiempo en comprender que la libertad nunca está donde uno cree, que los barrotes de mi cárcel podían ser los muslos adorados, pero qué dulce cárcel.

When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1879

he would have repeatedly encountered irresistible words such as "freedom," "liberty," "tyranny," and the "rights of man." 19 Well before he read any serious history, he garnered and cherished a vocabulary of liberation.

Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.

The cynic in Douglass left him saying, "Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people." 32

In August, Douglass righteously claimed that "everyone knows that this is the slaveholders' rebellion and nothing else." The war, he said, was the work of a "privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fasten upon the Negro's flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes.

this terrible baptism of blood and fire through which our nation is passing . . . not as has been most cruelly affirmed, because of the presence of men of color in the land, but by malignant . . . vices, nursed into power . . . at the poisoned breast of slavery, it will come at last . . . purified in its spirit freed from slavery, vastly greater . . . than it ever was before in all the elements of advancing civilization.

The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity's most universal aspiration. Douglass's life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855

Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition