Quotes About Freedom

Never let time be your master,' Bellman told Verney when he asked about it. 'If you want to do something, take it on. Time will always make itself.

When the time was right he would run away—and be part of the story.

Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free ourselves from the mundane it is essential that we delegate much of our interpretation of the world to that lower area of the mind that deals with the presumed, the assumed, the probable.

Què havia de fer de tota aquella llibertat?

This is a wonderful joke to play upon a prisoner, to promise forgiveness.

It's easy to be disciplined when you have no freedoms.

Interestingly, when they are on our side, we usually refer to them as guerrillas or partisans or freedom fighters. When they, the men in the hills, oppose a government we support, we call them insurgents.

Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.

I doubt if there is such a thing as a wholly free choice, because one's choices are rooted in one's personality.

If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.

Can you imagine what this old Negro had to go through? Can you imagine the day a Negro woman went to a black man and said: "Honey, I'm pregnant," and both of them fell on their knees and prayed that their baby would be born deformed? Can you imagine what this Negro went through, hoping his baby is born crippled? Because if he was born crippled, he would have less chance of being a slave and more chance of having freedom.

Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.

Even though he understood the depths of racism and black oppression, Ali lived his life as a free man—a free loving and lovable man.

Freedom is a school of responsibility for human beings.

Can there be any liberty," wrote James Otis in 1763, "where property is taken without consent?

In college I read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which contains this thrilling declaration: "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."23 We seem to have gone, in one generation, from the bracing atmosphere of Mill's On Liberty to the dark, dank atmosphere of Orwell's 1984.

The free society does not guarantee virtue any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed: it has to be won through personal striving.

The maxim, every man for himself," he writes, "embraces the whole moral code of a free society." The harsh competition of capitalism, Fitzhugh says, benefits the few and the strong while crushing the many and the weak. As a consequence of freedom, "the rich are continually growing richer and the poor poorer.

Republicans, meanwhile, to one degree or another, all opposed slavery. The party itself was founded to stop slavery.

So the Democratic defense went like this: all men are created equal, blacks are subhuman, which is to say, not fully men, therefore, we are justified in enslaving them.

The Republican abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the founding as a hideous compromise with slavery, came to understand the accomplishment of the framers. "Abolish slavery tomorrow," he said, "and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.

the morality of capitalism, just like the morality of democracy, is rooted in consent.

Let the sun be proud of its achievement." He added, "It is evident that white and black 'must fall or flourish together.' In the light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion ought to be repealed . . . and every right, privilege, and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color.

By contrast, Blanche K. Bruce was the real deal. Born into slavery in Virginia, Bruce was freed by his master and studied at Oberlin College before becoming a successful farmer and landowner. He is the only former slave to have served in the U.S. Senate.