Freedom

I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

He was of knyghthod and of fredom flour.

Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make.… They make them for their own protection, and to hell with them.

Some to the common pulpits, and cry out, “Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!”

Flout ’em, and scout ’em; and scout ’em, and flout ’em; Thought is free. 59

Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty’s in every blow! Let us do or die!

Give me again my hollow tree, A crust of bread, and liberty.

I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art.

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.

Hatred can be overcome only by love.

Take me for a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship, My senses have been stripped, My hands can’t feel to grip, My toes too numb to step Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honourable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here.

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.

Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called.

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into Freedom.

Those who have been once intoxicated with power . . . can never willingly abandon it.