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.
I can recall no parallel in history where a great nation recently at war has so distinguished its former enemy commander.
For from the error of not knowing, or understanding, what sin is, there necessarily arises another error, that people cannot know or understand what grace is.
How prone poor Humanity is to dam up the minutest remnants of its freedom, and build an artificial roof to prevent it looking up to the clear blue sky.
I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)
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