if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seek your own land. You young and a woman and there's serious limitation in both, but you are a person too. Don't let Lenore or some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That's slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

When I woke up I reminded myself that freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it. Now

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind. You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.

I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty.

To the two who gave me life and the one who made me free

The devil has some Christians in POW camps due to alcohol, drugs, pornography, fear, discouragement, depression, pride, narcissism, materialism, and a whole host of other problems.

The biblical scholar Wilhelm de Wette generalized the idea: "The spirit of Protestantism . . . leads necessarily to political freedom.