
“All men are by nature born equally free and independent.”
Remarks on Annual Elections (1775)
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)
“All men are by nature born equally free and independent.”
Remarks on Annual Elections (1775)
Lincoln Hall Speech (1879)
Context: Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.
Introduction.
An American Bible (1912)
Context: Elbert Hubbard sees, too, that just so long as there is one woman who is denied any right that man claims for himself, there is no free man; that no man can be a superior, true American so long as one woman is denied her birthright of life, liberty and happiness.
He knows that freedom to think and act, without withholding that right from any other, evolves humanity — Therefore he gives his best energy to inspiring men and women to think and to act, each for himself. He pleads for the rights of children, for so-called criminals, for the insane, the weak, and all those who having failed to be a friend to themselves, need friendship most. The Golden Rule is his rule of life.
His work is to emancipate American men and women from being slaves to useless customs, outgrown mental habits, outgrown religion, outgrown laws, outgrown superstitions. He would make each human being rely upon himself for health, wealth and happiness.
Argument Against the Writs of Assistance (1761)
Context: … [Slave] trade … is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish … liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman [peddler]…. The colonists are by the law of nature free-born, as indeed all men are, white or black... It is a clear truth, that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.
On Kippis; Gregory’s Life of Hall, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Gargantua (1534), Ch. 57 : How the Thelemites were governed, and of their manner of living; the famous dictum of the abbey of Theleme presented here, "Do what thou wilt" (Fais ce que voudras), evokes an ancient expression by St. Augustine of Hippo: "Love, and do what thou wilt." The expression of Rabelais was later used by the Hellfire Club established by Sir Francis Dashwood, and by Aleister Crowley in his The Book of the Law (1904): "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, p. 54 (1788) https://books.google.com/books?id=pBOe7105MhMC&pg=PA54
Books, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004)
Source: When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?
“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.”
Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West