Quotes About Emancipation

The National Convention declares that slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of French citizens."37

You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

What did former slaves become once emancipated?12 That second question is easy to miss if we assume that the only two conditions a person could occupy were either enslavement or full inclusion within the American polity complete with enjoyment of equal rights, or, in other words, citizenship as we currently conceptualize it.

By war's end, well over 400,000—somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of the entire U.S. slave population according to the 1860 census—had taken refuge behind Union lines, most of them in contraband camps.

the idea that the U.S. government would treat with an enslaved person directly as a person and not indirectly as the possession of a white property owner simply made no sense. Yet here were hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of exactly such people, right in the lap of the Union army, the most obvious embodiment of the U.S. government outside the White House

Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk — on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.

You'll never understand the true sense of freedom – until you lose it.

I only ask to be free, the butterflies are free.

I think I know the delights of freedom

Have I ever sought release?" "In words. No. Never.

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul...

Emancipation of women has made them lose their mystery.

Bad spellers of the world, untie!

Uncle Tom' did not originate in fiction. Nor did he die with the Emancipation proclamation. He is perpetuated and immortalized in the type of leadership that sells the Negro for a few 'sound American dollars.

Listening to a song] one could experience a freedom from one's physical body, and from one's social body - the mask you wore to go about in public among those who thought they knew you, an unchosen mask of nervousness and tradition, the mask that, when owrn too long, makes the face behind it shrivel up and rot away. For some, a spinning record opened up the possibility that one might say anything, in any voice, with any face, the singer's mask now a sign of mystery.

I... would not expect that freedom could be found or won without a price paid.

Could one forget how to be free?

those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of free air.

I would like so much to be the freest of free women: so free that I would even be liberated from the painful sensation of being liberated. I would like to be so freely free that I would never even think to say to myself: "How free I am!

And I want to become a woman I can love. I want to meet women who love themselves, who are alive, who are not debased, overshadowed, wiped out.

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.

Face your life, and give yourself the freedom to be whoever the hell you want to be in this world.

Sometimes it takes looking back, for you to realize that leaving someone and the pain they were causing you, was the best decision you ever made.

He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.