Freedom

So every bondman in his own hand bears The power to cancel his captivity.

I am as free as Nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

But little do or can the best of us: That little is achieved through Liberty.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realized. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory … In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Individual freedom provides a better basis for productive labor than any form of tyranny.

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails.

The more you let yourself go the less others let you go.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

Without freedom there can be no morality.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Now my soul hath elbow-room.

No Rack can torture me— My Soul—at Liberty— Behind this mortal Bone There knits a bolder One—

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

Everybody has the right to express what he thinks. That, of course, lets the crackpots in. But if you cannot tell a crackpot when you see one, then you ought to be taken in.

and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

Where’er I wander, boast of this I can, Though banish’d, yet a true-born Englishman.

Today unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!