Quotes About Freedom

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.

Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;--debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must perceive appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know...

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free. If you would correct my false view of facts, — hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.

A man must consider what rich realms he abdicates when he becomes a conformist

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If the singer sings from a sense of duty or from seeing no way of escape, I had rather have none.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is for slaves.

as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

Poets are thus liberating gods.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels. That is why so many actes gratuites are criminal: a man asserts his freedom by disobeying a law and retains a sense of self-importance because the law he has disobeyed is an important one. Much crime is magic, an attempt to make free with necessity.

I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw everything, why draw anything?

True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer.

The Fugitive Slave Law 1851–54

La naturaleza nos dotará del uniforme de prisión del partido al que nos adherimos.