Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the false nature of freedom when it is denied to others, likening it to a deceptive display.
Thomas Moore's quote highlights the irony and hypocrisy of claiming to be free while others remain enslaved. The 'fustian flag' symbolizes a superficial and insincere representation of freedom that mocks the suffering of those who are still bound by oppression, suggesting that true freedom cannot exist without the liberation of all individuals.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social justice, one might use this quote to illustrate the ongoing struggle against oppression.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.
Lukewarm people call 'radical' what Jesus expected of all His followers.
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.
I am dying, but the state remains.
I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
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