Quotes About Freedom

why make something your responsibility if it doesn't have to be?

Find a path in life that you can embrace and enjoy rather than something that you're expected to do. That's what makes life interesting.

Religion should be about your relationship with God, not what the church says you can and can't do.

They're not women's clothes. They're my clothes. I bought them.

It is up to white people to release themselves from their own captivity.

And, in the end, we must resist Ibsen's ghosts, the 'old ideas and beliefs' that cage us in categories and assumptions about who we are and what we are capable of and blind us to the beauty of others, never forgetting that categorization refers only to the different conditions under which we live; it doesn't capture the essence of who we are.

Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: "One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.

You know, it is for this reason that all this black, white, Armenian, Turkish, Greek, Jewish, etc., etc., etc., never carried any meaning for me. The question is how to fix ourselves. Give birth to ourselves. To make us live free of all these swaddling clothes, free of these habits.

people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn't…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn't, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. American

It was a place that denied the contradiction between its commitments to freedom and democracy and its practice of slavery and white supremacy.

I believe an elsewhere can and must be found here: in our efforts to refuse to accommodate and adjust to the status quo and in those very small moments when we make choices that place us outside of the norms and expectations that confine us, when we cultivate the capacity to say no. In

The seventies involved a confrontation with a frightening truth: that despite the sacrifices and costs of the black freedom struggle, the country remained profoundly racist and, no matter its proclamations to the contrary, white America was perfectly comfortable with that fact.

The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.

People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world!

Life is too short. Don't walk. Don't run. Fly.

Well. You can start painting now. Just get a piece of paper and a pencil. And drive the pencil like you were dancing

Ma-ma-oo didn't gun the motor so we puttered along. The day promised to be a scorcher, but out on the ocean with the spray cooling on my face and the wind drying it away, the heat was bearable. I wished summer would never end. I wished I could do this all year and never have to go back to school. I wished I could pick berries and go fishing with Ma-ma-oo and spend all my days wandering.

If you love someone, let them go. And if you have to point a gun at them to get them to talk to you, it's probably not meant to be.

Governments should not possess instruments of coercion and violence denied to their citizens.

Freedom is ugly, but is much more beautiful than slavery.

Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?

The liberty of the press is most generally approved when it takes liberties with the other fellow, and leaves us alone.

The past can't touch you unless you let it.

A man without fear cannot be a slave.