Quotes About Freedom

Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.

I broke the spell that held me long, The dear, dear witchery of song. I said, the poet's idle lore Shall waste my prime of years no more, For Poetry, though heavenly born, Consorts with poverty and scorn.

Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.

Go forth under the open sky, and list to Nature's teachings.

To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force, when all are unanimous in the determination to be free, is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people; all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe...

There is no fear of robbers nor highwaymen, no one challenges you where you are going nor where you have come from;

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

the summer of 1600 that the Privy Council had a change of heart and felt confident enough to stress the universal freedom of the seas and the right of all nations to send ships wherever they wished.

Walt Whitman was not the first to observe that we are all naked under our clothes, but he was one of the greatest, if not the first, to preach a gospel of nudity.

Freedom to do as we're told under the law!

the subversion of free speech and free thought are the worst forms of subversion.

Exactly, what form this alteration has taken. I will never know. I don't feel sedated, jittery or drugged. I simply feel normal-as if I had been driving a car all these years with the parking brake on, and now it is off. I feel as if the real me has returned, perhaps all the way from childhood, where she lived before The Beast arrived.

Be attached to nothing and open to everything.

There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.

Freedom is strangely ephemeral. It is something like breathing; one only becomes acutely aware of its importance when one is choking.

The wonder of markets is that they reconcile the choices of myriad individuals.

Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourth of July, I'll bow and remember you. Who shall we follow next? Who shall we kill next time?

Or ever the knightly years were goneWith the old world to the grave,I was a King in BabylonAnd you were a Christian Slave.

Art is life, plus caprice.

The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist.

Art is not the handmaid of politics. It is its own remedy! And its healing is sacral.

Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and security.

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.