Quotes About Freedom

The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right," as Martin Luther King Jr. once said. The nation is often wrong. But so long as protest is possible, it can always be righted.

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There's only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.

In Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson asked, dryly, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Paine wrote with fury, and he wrote with flash. "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind," he announced. "' Tis not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe.

DURING THE WAR, nearly one in five slaves in the United States left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty.

Friedman published a book aimed at a general audience, Capitalism and Freedom, in which he argued that personal freedom can only be assured by the free market system.

To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched," Jefferson conceded. But when they do, "They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human."33

a judge in Vermont ruled in favor of a runaway slave whose master had produced a bill of sale proving his ownership: the judge said in order to retain his property in the form of another man he'd have to provide a bill of sale from "God Almighty." 17

Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.

But the university has obligations, too, to freedom of speech, whose premise, however idealized, is that, in a battle between truth and error, truth, in an open field will always win. If the commitment to these difficult freedoms has sometimes flagged...it has just as often been renewed. Free speech is not a week or a place. It is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth.

The Mercy of some of these Men is Cruelty itself," he wrote. "It were better for us and the Indians also, that we had no Liberty.

In Norfolk, Virginia, four thousand slaves—who, living in a border state that was not part of the Confederacy, were not actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—

The only way to justify this contradiction, the only way to explain how one kind of people are born free while another kind of people are not, would be to sow a new seed, an ideology of race. It would take a long time to grow, and longer to wither.

On July 11, Wilson asked why, if slaves were admitted as people, they weren't "admitted as Citizens." And "then why are they not admitted on an equality with White Citizens?" And, if they weren't admitted as people, "Are they admitted as property? Then why is not other property admitted into the computation?

Those who are by nature possessions are those who have a lesser capacity for reason; these people "are by nature slaves," Aristotle wrote, "and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master."40

To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched," Jefferson conceded. But when they do, "They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.

To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past.

mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.

Study hard, little one. For if you can read, you can slip into the pages of a book and escape into your mind.

Having no choices, no agency, was a killer, but having too many was equally crippling.

Freedom of expression in Athens, as readers well know, was not without limits: the vote to convict Socrates may have been democratic, but it nonetheless resulted in the ultimate silencing of his speech.

This is just as true in the United States as it has been in Egypt, Tunisia, and dozens of other locales around the world, and despite mainstream media's heavy focus over the past few years on the alleged censorship of right-wing populists, it is and has always been marginalized communities most affected by these new forms of censorship.