Quotes About Freedom

the romantic waste places of the world.

La libertad y la simple belleza de la vida son algo demasiado valioso como para desperdiciarlo.

He was alone," as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. "He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

Nothing suits a director any better than to hop on a train with his company and go somewhere, no matter where it is, as long as he can get away from the studio. —William Fox, December 27, 1917

Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops.

Songs are the soul of movement! - MLK Jr.

I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, 'Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned?' The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. 'Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.

The American people," Small added, "must understand that as soon as America doesn't stand for something in the world, there is going to be a tremendous erosion of freedom.

Arguing for black enfranchisement in 1867, Frederick Douglass said: "If black men have no rights in the eyes of white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the blacks. The result is a war of races, and the annihilation of all proper human relations.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.2 —American motto suggested

Gerould observed: "America is no longer a free country, in the old sense; and liberty is, increasingly, a mere rhetorical figure….The only way in which an American citizen who is really interested in all the social and political problems of his country can preserve any freedom of expression, is to choose the mob that is most sympathetic to him, and abide under the shadow of that mob.

appreciate the value of our free institutions." In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the "American Idea," which was a "composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….

An interest willing to suppress speech was an interest willing to put its own power ahead of democracy.

The world was not perfect, nor was it perfectible, but on we went, in the face of inequities and inequalities, seeking to expand freedom at home, to defend liberty abroad, to conquer disease and go to the stars. For notably among nations, the United States has long been shaped by the promise, if not always by the reality, of forward motion, of rising greatness, and of the expansion of knowledge, of wealth, and of happiness.

It was, instead, about urging African Americans to draw on the traditions of the American Revolution to battle state-sanctioned white supremacy in order to claim their rightful place as citizens.

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way," Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, "and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a

The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it.

It's tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced—and too often paid—the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color.

From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule—one common to the world's religious and moral traditions—has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln's own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," he once wrote. "This expresses my idea of democracy.