Samuel Adams Quotes

The wretch who lives without freedom feels like dressing in the mud from the streets Those who have you, o Liberty, do not know. you. Those who do not have you should not speak of you, but win you.

If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny.

I know why the caged bird sings.

You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist

The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free.

Resistance is the secret of joy!

If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.

I was born a slave, but nature gave me a soul of a free man.

My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom.

Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.

I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

I believe that it would be almost impossible to find anywhere in America a black man who has lived further down in the mud of human society than I have; or a black man who has been any more ignorant than I have; or a black man who has suffered more anguish during his life than I have. But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

No people ever yet groaned under the heavy yoke of slavery, but when they deserv'd it. ...The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought. ...If therefore a people will not be free; if they have not virtue enough to maintain their liberty against a presumptuous invader, they deserve no pity, and are to be treated with contempt and ignominy.

Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.

Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.

And if I have to die trying, I will get out of here.

In spite of the problems he was having he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don’t or won’t or can’t and plenty of them aren’t in prison either.

We all need to demand the happiness for ourselves we desire. Fight for it. Wrestle it out of the clenched fist of the world you live in

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

It will take a nation of millions to hold me back.

I see people whose spirits are not broken, who continue to work for justice. That makes me feel alive, when I witness their work, and then I witness some of their dreams come to fruition.

Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.

Your readiness to suffer will light the torch of freedom which will never be put out.

Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you've grown, lifting.

How can one be compelled to accept slavery? I simply refuse to do the master's bidding. He may torture me, break my bones to atoms and even kill me. He will then have my dead body, not my obedience. Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done.