Quotes About Liberty

You have to care about what you're doing. If you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don't have to do the right thing, that society will break down, and you will have no liberty. I refuse to be a part of that.30

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she'd taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, "I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel." It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. "So we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it?

hereby certify that on this day, 26 November 1803, in the city of Charleston, in the state of South Carolina, I set free from slavery, Hetty Grimké, and bestow this certificate of manumission upon her. Sarah Moore Grimké

Reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give

I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.

Independence is happiness.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

Freedom has always been dangerous.

You know what else is my constitutional right? To get an abortion. You don't get to choose what rights belong to me.

No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape.

It was now the stormy equinoctial weather that sounds the wild dirge of autumn, and marches the winter in. I love, and always did, that grand undefinable music, threatening and bewailing, with its strange soul of liberty and desolation.

It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.

My friend gave me an opportunity to be bad, that is, free.

Nosotros arrastramos los pies en ríos de sangre seca, almas que se pegaron a la tierra por amor, no queremos otros mundos que el de la libertad y esta palabra no la palabreamos porque sabemos hace mucha muerte que se habla enamorado y no del amor, se habla claro, no de la claridad, se habla libre, no de la libertad.

You will find in the end, my dear friend, that there is nothing more oppressie than freedom.

Freedom is a thing you make', he says, with sudden vehemence. 'You maki it by what you do. That's about the only thing that is left us in this world.

No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.

It is very difficult for most healthy Americans to envision themselves as the ones whose liberty might be threatened in the effort to protect the health of the community. As a society, we have become masters of stigmatizing the sick and the contagious; we label them as separate from the mainstream.

Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.

I don't have much patience for people who enjoy limitless liberty while decrying those who get their hands dirty to make sure it exists for them.

To be deprived of parents - is that where freedom starts?

Defiendo la democracia burguesa que nos permite la ilusión de creer que gozamos de libertad, eso es todo.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.