7 & 7: Freedom vs. Bondage

REFLECTION:

The human race throughout all time has been subjected to many forms of bondage. Freedom has been the response, the willingness to take a chance understanding that the worst is already today’s reality. With all else gone, the chains are broken. What do we fight for? To speak our mind and disapprove. To be unencumbered by brutality and restrictions to growth and self development. To be unpopular. To be responsible for ourselves. Achieving freedom and practicing freedom are not the same. Once gained, freedom must find expression in the vigilant pursuit of justice here at home. The pursuit of more can disappoint and lead directly to less, so fettered down may we become with things that do not matter, that we are no longer free to embrace and must be content to join at a point here or there, no longer free to think, just free to speak in tired words. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Self-evident yes, but not secure without hard work and a decent respect.

MUSES:

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.
Albert Camus

When you have robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power. He is free again.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire

You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
Robert Frost

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai Stevenson

When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom of responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and never was free again.
Edith Hamilton

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.
Clarence Darrow

Lives based on having are less free than lives based on doing or on being.
William James

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
Robert Browning

We never touch but at points.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principals, and organize its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Thomas Jefferson