Quotes About Freedom

An essential difference between the American and French revolutions was that the American version allowed a search for many truths, while French zealots tried to impose a single sacred truth that allowed no deviation. page 714

He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton's lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order. The

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if "having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?

Wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"49

Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy "christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice."19 To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was given four slaves as playmates.20 Obviously John Custis didn't rate very highly as a child psychologist.

Every nation has a right to carve out its own happiness in its own way."25

We have abundant reason to rejoice that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition," President Washington wrote to one Baltimore church.26 "Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.

Patrick Henry, the leading antifederalist, warned delegates who supported the Constitution, "They'll free your niggers.

By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction

When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of his home state, Virginia.

To the young American Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open;

With a country boy's love of open spaces, he hated anything confined or cluttered

His whole soul was enlisted in the cause and in contending for the rights of the jury and a free press, he considered that he was establishing the surest refuge against oppression.

he "taught men how to use money and how not to be its slave.

betrayed intense sympathy for the Union cause and fervently advocated abolishing slavery. As early as his 1854 high-school essay on freedom, he had railed against "cruel masters" who worked their slaves "beneath the scorching suns of the South. How under such circumstances can America call herself free?

He gravitated toward women who were free and independent, sassy and high-spirited.

The American Revolution had succeeded because it was "a free, regular and deliberate act of the nation" and had been conducted with "a spirit of justice and humanity." It was, in fact, a revolution written in parchment and defined by documents, petitions, and other forms of law.

liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power. . . . [T]he former rather than the latter is apparently most to be apprehended by the United States.

United Colonies of America.

Via com bastante clareza que mais liberdade podia conduzir a uma maior desordem e, por uma dialética perigosa, de volta à perda da liberdade.

He worried that a certain unnamed party might impose despotism: "To watch the progress of such endeavours is the office of a free press. To give us early alarm and put us on our guard against the encroachments of power. This then is a right of the utmost importance, one for which, instead of yielding it up, we ought rather to spill our blood."26

I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. there was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.