Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time – 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn’t have toilets in the fields; they didn’t have cold drinking water. They didn’t have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known – the plantations – because they attempted to exercise their ‚democratic‘ right to vote.

The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror – and America is honored to be their friend.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

You’ve got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

Each time we cooperate with God, we take one more giant step forward. Because when God asks us to change, it means that He always has something better to give us – more freedom, greater joy, and greater blessings.

Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.

The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don’t belong anymore to anyone, that I’m not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

Mubarak was oppressing and pillaging his own people. He was an enemy to the Palestinians and an accomplice of Israel, the sixth nuclear power on the planet, associated with the war-mongering NATO group.

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

‚Whole Women’s Health‘ made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.

A great fortune is a great slavery.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

We must make it clear that a platform of ‚I hate gay men and women‘ is not a way to become president of the United States.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

The battle for women’s rights has been largely won.

Man, all lives matter.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.