Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn't choose it and I don't want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free man -- it means "Beloved of God" -- and I insist people use it in speaking of and to me.

I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want.

People who changed the world have declared independence from other people's expectations.

decided years ago, as a teenager, that nobody has the liberty to control my rights because my rights are God-given and inherent. Some people are amazed at my outlook. A black preacher came up to me one time and said, "Man, you're a different kind of black man." I said, "No, I am in control of whose opinions are important." There is a significant difference between demanding one's rights from someone and displaying the rights one already possesses.

Deliverance is not the same as freedom. Deliverance is release from the oppressor, but freedom is deliverance from oppression.

There is truly no greater burden than freedom, no heavier load than liberty.

The dreams we have that refuse to die—dreams of freedom and beauty, of order and love, dreams that we can make a real difference in the world—come into their own when we put them within a framework of belief in a God who made the world and is going to sort it out once and for all, and wants to involve human beings in that process.

We are like a frightened bird before him, shrinking away lest his demand crush us completely. But when we eventually yield—when he corners us and finally takes us into his hand—we find to our astonishment that he is infinitely gentle and that his only aim is to release us from our prison, to set us free to be the people he made us to be. But when we fly out into the sunshine, how can we not then offer the same gentle gift of freedom, of forgiveness, to those around us?

has happened before—literally, with the ending of the slave trade and the subsequent freeing of the slaves—and it needs to happen again. And happen it will, because the victory of the cross is real, and the power of the Spirit to implement that victory is real as well.

An over-authoritarian church, paying no attention to experience, solves the problem by paving the garden with concrete. An over-experiential church solves the (real or imagined) problem of concrete (rigid and "judgmental" forms of faith) by letting anything and everything grow unchecked, sometimes labeling concrete as "law" and so celebrating any and every weed as "grace.

That is why, in accordance with the Bible, the message of freedom from all "powers" (the Passover message) is directly connected to the message of "forgiveness of sins" (the message of the end of exile).

From the earliest writings we have, it was seen as the direct and necessary result of the creator God overthrowing on the cross the powers that had kept the nations captive. Up to now the nations had been enslaved; the cross had opened the gates to freedom.