What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

~ Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass Abolition Activism Agitation Dissent Human Rights Liberties Politics Power Radicalism Rights Slavery Suffrage

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

~ Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass Activism Agitation Dissent Liberties Power Radicalism Rights

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

~ Sara Sheridan

Sara Sheridan Capitalism Care Employment Freedom Homelessness Internet Issues Liberties Libraries Net Neutrality Online Personal Rich Poor Divide Rights

Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind.

~ Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Capitalism Communism Environmentalism Liberties

If you're patriotic, stand up for the Bill of Rights because once they strip your rights from you, you will pay hell to get them back. You will and we're in the process of it right now.

~ Jesse Ventura

Jesse Ventura Corruption Liberties Patriotism

It was by one Union that we achieved our independence and liberties, and by it alone can they be maintained.

~ James Monroe

James Monroe Alone Union Liberties

In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.

~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Henri-Frédéric Amiel Freedom First Liberties