The function of freedom is to free someone else.
Interpretation
Freedom is meant to be shared and used to uplift others.
This quote by Toni Morrison highlights the idea that true freedom extends beyond individual liberty; it emphasizes the responsibility to help others achieve their freedom. It suggests that one's own liberation is only meaningful when it contributes to the liberation of others, fostering a sense of community and collective well-being.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, one might say, 'As Toni Morrison said, the function of freedom is to free someone else, inspiring us to act for the benefit of the oppressed.'
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rainβthis is nothing beside a life without poetry.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
Seek always to do some good, somewhere... Even if it's a little thing, so something for those that need help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.
Every moment there is creation, every moment destruction. There is no absolute creation, no absolute destruction. Both are movement, and that is eternal.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
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