Whitman Freedom Quotes

Be not dishearten'd -- Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet; Those who love each other shall become invincible.

Freedom: to walk free and own no superior

O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning! It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time, I will have thousands of globes and all time.

From this hour, freedom! Going where I like, my own master...

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

i've been reading whitman, you know what he says, cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the bard, the zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and there have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, i see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up into the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures

Freedom is not in doing what you want to do, but in becoming what you want to be.

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?

O something unprov’d! something in a trance! O madness amorous! O trembling! O to escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds! To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous! To court destruction with taunts—with invitations! To ascend—to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me! To rise thither with my inebriate Soul! To be lost, if it must be so! To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy.

To a Certain Cantatrice     Here, take this gift,   I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or general,   One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, the       progress and freedom of the race,   Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;   But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any.

If America is not for freedom I do not see what it is for.

I believe in all that—in baseball, in picnics, in freedom.

I have not felt to warble and trill, however sweetly, I have felt to soar in freedom and in the fullness of power, joy, volition.

Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making first-class men. It is life's gymnasium, not of good only, but of all. We try often, though we fall back often. A brave delight, fit for freedom's athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success.

America means above all toleration, catholicity, welcome, freedom--a concern for Europe, for Asia, for Africa, along with its concern for America. It is something quite peculiar, hardly to be stated--evades you as the air--yet is a fact everywhere preciously present.

This is What You Shall Do and Not Do Know your worth, know your limits, know your boundlessness, know your strengths, know your weaknesses, know your accomplishments, and know your dreams. Be a mirror for all those who project their darkness onto you; do not internalize it. Don’t seek validation from those who will refuse to understand you. Don’t say yes, when you need to say no. Don’t stay when you know you should go. Don’t go when you know you should stay. Respond, don’t react. Behave in a manner aligning with your values. Sleep. Seek out quiet. Don’t glorify busyness. Reignite your curiosity for the world. Explore new horizons. Be honest with yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Approach yourself as you would approach a child—with a kind tone and deep understanding. Love yourself or, at the very least, have mercy on yourself. Be your own parent, your own child, your own lover, your own partner. Give less of your time to employment that drains you of your enthusiasm for life. Reclaim your freedom by redefining your necessities. Take that gathered energy; devote your precious life to your passions. Unplug from the babble. Seek awe. It is the counterbalance to trauma. Do your psychological work, and don’t take any one else’s work upon yourself. Protect your peace. Listen to what your heart knows; fuck everything else.

We seem afraid of the natural forces. John Burroughs puts it well, says, if the American is only dry, he is not content to take a drink of pure cold water, but must put sugar into it, or a flavor. To me, these things—the things of which these are the type—are the prominent dangers in the future of our America. The exhilaration of such freedom—the going and coming—the being master of yourself and of the road! No one who is not a walker can begin to know it! Oh! the long, long walks, way into the nights!—in the after hours—sometimes lasting till two or three in the morning! The air, the stars, the moon, the water—what a fullness of inspiration they imparted!—what exhilaration! And there were the detours, too—wanderings off into the country out of the beaten path: I remember one place in Maryland in particular to which we would go. How splendid, above all, was the moon—the full moon, the half moon: and then the wonder, the delight, of the silences.

century America was a country, wrote Fritsch, that had finally learned the error of its egalitarian ways: “America, soaked in ideas of freedom and equality, has hitherto accorded equal rights to all races. But it finds itself compelled to revise its attitudes and its laws and create restrictions on Negroes and Chinese.”82 To Fritsch, the history of American immigration law offered a parable on the dangers of ignoring race in favor of a foolish egalitarianism. As we shall see shortly, Hitler and other Nazis would often repeat Fritsch’s interpretive line.

If the American culture of movies, shopping males, and soft drinks cannot inspire us, there are other Americas that can: Americas of renegades and prisoners, of dreamers and outsiders. Something can be salvaged from the twisted wreck of the “democratic sprit” celebrated by Walt Whitman, something subverted from the sense that each person has worth and dignity: a spirit that can be sustained on self-reliance and initiative. These Americas are America of the alienated and marginalized: indigenous warriors, the freedom fighters of civil rights, the miners’ rebelling in the Appalachian Mountains. America’s past is full of revolutionary hybrids; our lists could stretch infinitely onwards towards undiscovered past or future. The monolith of a rich and plump America must be destroyed to make room for many Americas. A folk anarchist culture rising in the periphery of America, and can grow in the fertile ground that lies beneath the concrete of the great American wasteland. Anyone struggling today – living the hard life and fighting the even harder fight – is a friend even if he or she can never share a single meal with us, or speak our language. The anarchists of America, with our influence as wide as our prairies and dreams that could light those prairies on fire, can make entire meals on discarded food, live in abandoned buildings, and travel on the secret paths of lost highways and railroads, we are immensely privileged.

How old are you, son?' Whitman asked. 'Going on seventeen.' 'So young,' he said, stroking the back of my hand with his poem-stained fingers. 'How did you come to lose your eye?' I told him the story of my heroism, with embellishments--told it so well, I was nearly persuaded of my exceptional character. 'You sacrificed what little you had to call your own for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. You gave an eye, half of man's greatest blessing, when rich men up north paid a small price to keep themselves and their sons from harm.' With those few words, accompanied by a glance that seemed to measure the dimensions of my meager existence, Whitman made me see myself as a sacrifice on the altar of wealth, but a hero notwithstanding.

Be not dishearten’d—Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet; Those who love each other shall become invincible. —WALT WHITMAN, “Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice

once, Lincoln was confronting one of the deepest crises of his presidency. For months it had been clear to many, from George Whitman and Henry Abbott to the president’s cabinet, that the Emancipation Proclamation would be only a sad joke if Lincoln had no power to force the Southern states to comply. His latest attempt to impose his will upon the South had ended in the slaughter on Marye’s Heights. His promise of freedom to the enslaved millions within the Confederacy now looked embarrassingly empty. Less than three weeks before he was scheduled to sign the measure, it seemed likely that the president

Even if you already have an abundance of love, success, joy, freedom . . . there is always more for you to experience, for the simple reason that this universe never ends.

But the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—that was my America. The America Tocqueville wrote about, the countryside of Whitman and Thoreau, with no person my inferior or my better; the America of pioneers heading west in search of a better life or immigrants landing on Ellis Island, propelled by a yearning for freedom.

From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain’s ability to control our many degrees of freedom. This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers. It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are. The reality of this kind of free will is underlined by the fact that it cannot be taken for granted. Brain injuries, or unlucky draws from the lotteries of our genes and our environments, can undermine our ability to exercise voluntary behaviour. People with anarchic hand syndrome make voluntary actions which they do not experience as being theirs, while those with akinetic mutism are unable to make any voluntary actions at all. An awkwardly located brain tumour can transform an engineering student into a mass school shooter, as happened in the case of Charles Whitman, the ‘Texas Tower Sniper’, or engender in a previously blameless teacher a rampant paedophilia – a tendency which disappeared when the tumour was removed, and returned when it grew back.

what we are truly seeking through their creation is the feeling of exhilaration, accomplishment and freedom we experience each and every time we grow into a larger and more complete manifestation of ourselves.

Human beings are biologically programmed with the following eight desires: 1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension. 2. Enjoyment of food and beverages. 3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger. 4. Sexual companionship. 5. Comfortable living conditions. 6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses. 7. Care and protection of loved ones. 8. Social approval.

Walt Whitman’s eye, that “the history of the world is the progress in the consciousness of freedom . . . The scheme is this: the oriental world only knew that one is free [that is, the ruler]; the Greek and Roman world knew that some are free [the ruling classes]; but we know that all men, in their true nature, are free,—that man, as man, is free.”2