Quotes About Freedom

For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.

To us today, it seems completely hypocritical to fight a war for "liberty and freedom" when 20 percent of your population is in chains. People back then saw the hypocrisy too. It made some of them uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to change the law, not right away. Vermont abolished slavery on July 8, 1777, when it adopted its state constitution. After the Revolution, the other states in the North gradually required slave owners to free their slaves.

The only way to achieve freedom is to fight for it.

Slaves were people of African descent who were not paid for their work and had to do everything demanded by the person who owned them. They had no rights and little protection from cruel treatment and inhumane living conditions. Slaves were not allowed to marry and children were frequently sold away from their parents.

IT WOULD BE USELESS FOR US TO DENOUNCE THE SERVITUDE TO WHICH THE PARLIAMENT OF GREAT BRITAIN WISHES TO REDUCE US, WHILE WE CONTINUE TO KEEP OUR FELLOW CREATURES IN SLAVERY JUST BECAUSE THEIR COLOR IS DIFFERENT FROM OURS. —SIGNER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, WHO PURCHASED WILLIAM GRUBBER IN 1776 AND DID NOT FREE HIM UNTIL 1794

OUR FREEDOM DEPENDS ON THE EXERTIONS OF A FEW PATRIOTIC INDIVIDUALS. IT IS WITH GRIEF THAT WE LEARN THAT THE CONGRESS IS MADE UP OF SO FEW OF THEM. —DIARY OF CHRISTOPHER MARSHALL, PHILADELPHIA PHARMACIST

For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better. Then

The shape of my life had altered when Bellingham enlisted me. It changed again when I escaped the prison. It shattered when Isabel left.

I felt so powerful that I wanted to go to Costco and wheel out a freezer on a dolly while waving around an old Safeway receipt, just because I knew I could. It's easy. I'm supposed to be so harmless and weak and afraid that no one pays attention. But those weeks of dye stripping and returning to my natural state created a phenomenon in which the world had literally become mine for the taking.

Oddly enough, the very considerations that had made marriage impossible for him were mirrored in my own being: a rabidly independent nature, an impatience with lesser minds, total unconventionality, and the horror of being saddled with someone who would need cosseting and protection—the

A woman who plays by men's rules is a woman who ends up in a cage." "Or a coffin.

Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.

all six of them a license." "That

The Turks have dreary jails.

Lovers are never equally matched - do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?

I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!

I have decided to leave Clea's last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

i imagine therefore I belong and am free.

In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him'.*

When one is fully extended by day and exhausted every evening one lives differently, without the weight of yesterday or tomorrow on one's shoulders. I

For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free".' Of

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

We start to die when we no longer have the power to choose.