Maya Angelou quotes about freedom

Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else's freedom.

Never give up on him. Never deny him. And remember, he is freer than those who hold him behind bars.

It is my neck and my life. I will live it whole or not at all.

At last, I'll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself.

I know now that until the lowliest Negro sharecropper in the South is free, I am not free.

Black people are letting white Americans know that the time is coming for ballots or bullets.

Permit? If we left it to you whites we'd be in the same shape as our folks in South Africa. We'd have to have a permit to breathe.

Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you're black in this country, you're on a plantation.

They shot me and said my fighting days were over, but if I am paralyzed and can only lift my eyelids, I will stare the white oppressors out of Africa.

It was the awakening summer of 1960 and the entire country was in labor. Something wonderful was about to be born, and we were all going to be good parents to the welcome child. Its name was Freedom.

Anyway, if more Africans had eaten more missionaries, the Continent would be in better shape.

We, in Kenya, are women, not just wombs. We have shown during Mau Mau that we have ideas as well as babies.

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide

My spirit is the surge of open seas.

I was born to work but I ain’t no mule.

Living our lives with flash and style

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

Independence is a heady draft, and if you drink it in your youth it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine.

I don’t believe that we should be brutal about anything, however, it is wonderfully liberating to be honest.

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

Money and power can liberate only if they are used to do so. They can imprison and inhibit more finally than barred windows and iron chains.

Every person needs to take one day away.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.