Liberation Quotes

When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.

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

Dance when you're perfectly free.

I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.

From this hour, freedom! Going where I like, my own master.

Socialist revolution aims at liberating the productive forces. The changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership in agriculture and handicrafts and from capitalist to socialist ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces. Thus, the social conditions are being created for a tremendous expansion of industrial and agricultural production.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both.

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Let us live so we do not regret years of inertia and ignorance, so when we die we can say all of our energy was dedicated to the noble liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own.

The time has come to accept in our hearts and minds that with freedom comes responsibility.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.

Hope has returned to the hearts of scores of millions of men and women, and with that hope there burns the flame of anger against the brutal, corrupt invader ... In a dozen famous ancient States now prostrate under the Nazi yoke, the masses of the people ... await the hour of liberation ... That hour will strike, and its solemn peal will proclaim that the night is past and that the dawn has come.

In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn't just hold - that's ego. Love liberates. It doesn't bind. Love says, 'I love you. I love you if you're in China. I love you if you're across town. I love you if you're in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I'd like to have your arms around me. I'd like to hear your voice in my ear. But that's not possible now, so I love you. Go.'

The Chinese people have stood up.

How can one liberate the many? By first liberating his own being. He does this not by elevating himself, but by lowering himself. He lowers himself to that which is simple, modest, true; integrating it into himself, he becomes a master of simplicity, modesty, truth.

No practice can take you to liberation. That is important to know. It can be a little step that is useful until you realize you don't need it anymore, because after a certain point it becomes a hindrance.

As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it.

You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open.

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, Keeps dropping keys all night long For the beautiful rowdy prisoners.

To end slavery, you must overcome the mental and physical inertia of the masses and quicken their intelligence and creative faculty.

There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.

If you can get rid of your attachment to a single thing, you are on the way to liberation.

Forgiveness. It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody. You are relieved of carrying that burden of resentment. You really are lighter. You feel lighter. You just drop that.

I am the dream and the hope of the slave

We are all victims of the violence that animals suffer... their liberation is also our liberation.

Your lifetime in form is to be honored and celebrated. Go beyond your enslavement, and live fully in the now, as this is the only time you have.

I lost everything i have, found myself.

The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.

Freedom can never be true of name and form; it is the clay out of which we (the pots) are made; then it is limited and not free, so that freedom can never be true of the related. One pot can never say "I am free" as a pot; only as it loses all ideas of form does it become free.

But I think I'm on track to do something even bigger. I liberate minds with my music. That's more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.

No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.

Do not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness.

They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.

When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way... It is a shift from identification with form --the thought or the emotion-- to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form -- spacious awareness.

The war against hunger is truly mankind's war of liberation.

I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I, and you, the people, are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.

You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.'

Be not the slave of your own past.

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads.

Your way begins at the other side.Become the sky.Take an axe to the prison wall.Escape.Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.Do it now.

The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age.

Let the fear go, and live your life with the power of love.

There is no such thing as slow freedom. Freedom is like a birth. Till we are fully free we are slaves. All birth takes place in a moment.

The truth is we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free.

Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.

What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.

We must also know that even before liberation in 1994 there [in South Africa] were people with resources who tried to share with those who were deprived.

You are the light of the world. You are theconsciousness that illuminates the world. Know yourself as that, and that'sfreedom, liberation, awakening, the end of suffering and madness. And it'shappening right here.

Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

Out of the huts of history's shame I rise.

Our task is not to liberate the oppressed, but to liberate the oppressors

It is the hero alone, not the coward, who has liberation within his easy reach.