#bertie

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, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#activism #agitation #dissent #human-rights #liberties

I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules. ↗

— Michelangelo Antonioni

#began #directors #i #ignore #liberties

It doesn't matter what color, sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc., everyone should have the same freedoms and liberties. ↗

— Lance Bass

#color #etc #everyone #freedoms #liberties

The Inspector General issued six reviews and reports on actions taken based on provisions of the act. In those six reports, the IG found that not one violation of an individual's civil liberties - a total of zero - had taken place since the act was instituted. ↗

— Jo Bonner

#actions #based #civil #civil liberties #found

What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. ↗

— Elbridge Gerry

#army #attempt #bane #destroy #establishment

I have very real concerns about the civil liberties implications of ultimately requiring every resident to submit themselves for compulsory fingerprinting or some other biometric test. ↗

— Patricia Hewitt

#civil #civil liberties #compulsory #concerns #every

Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed. ↗

— Michael Korda

#dress #greater #liberties #men #naturally

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#democratic #destroy #know #liberties #means

Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny. ↗

— Frances Wright

#exert #expense #injury #justly #liberties

Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals. Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been. ↗

— Peter Watts

#humans #seligman #the-state #change