The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation the expansion of women's rights or now gay rights I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Equality rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences wrongly understood as it has been so tragically in our time it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Until justice is blind to color until education is unaware of race until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately it can propel people toward social emancipation.