Echo
Liberty is a demand
Freedom in this thread is not a mood and not a gift. It is argued in assemblies, refused by law, and claimed by people the law did not have in mind.
1 · Patrick Henry
Give me liberty, or give me death!Douglass, speaking to a country that quoted Henry and kept slavery, names the missing verb: demand.
2 · Frederick Douglass
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.Mill draws the line at the person. Over one’s own mind, he says, the individual is sovereign.
3 · John Stuart Mill
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.King writes from a Birmingham jail that a local injustice is already everybody’s.
4 · Martin Luther King Jr.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.Mandela, on trial, offers his own life as the stake of the same claim.
5 · Nelson Mandela
It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.