Freedom

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

Freely we serve, Because we freely love, as in our will To love or not; in this we stand or fall.

They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.

Me this unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires; My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same.

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave, Spirit of Night!

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

The only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.

A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Good government is no substitute for self-government.

The question is not who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held itin my hand. I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Love to faults is always blind, Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d, and unconfin’d, And breaks all chains from every mind.

Liberties … depend on the silence of the law.

Slaves cannot breathe in England, if their lungs

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

Your educators can only be your liberators.

We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.

 

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of dist.

As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude.