A Quote by Jonathan Sacks

If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.

Jonathan Sacks

Quote Topics

Affliction Alternative Bitter Bread Cherish Freedom Guard Herbs Must Remember Slavery

Quote Author

Jonathan Sacks
British - Priest
Born: March 8, 1948

As for the bitter herbs.... To see everyone with tears coursing down their faces, laughing and gasping at the same time, is fun and also makes the point - bitter herbs must be really bitter to experience the suffering.

Julia Neuberger, Baroness Neuberger

Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.

Paul Robeson

We are thinking about bad only those who are worse than we are, and those who are better than us ... I'm just not up to us ... One does not follow it than smell roses. Another of the bitter herbs will produce honey. Give bread to one - will remember forever. Another life donation - do not understand.

Omar Khayyam

It is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought. ... Christ asks us to guard the truth because, as he promised us: "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free." Depositum custodi! We must guard the truth that is the condition of authentic freedom, the truth that allows freedoms to be fulfilled in goodness. We must guard the deposit of divine truth handed down to us.

Pope John Paul II

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for it's bloom, or it's garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and pot-herbs.

Margaret Fuller

Democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves they will seek it, cherish it, and view any deprivation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.

Frederick Douglass

Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

Jonathan Safran Foer

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

Washington Irving

We must work passionately and unrelentingly for the goal of freedom, but we must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. We must never struggle with falsehood, hate, or malice. We must never become bitter.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is the difference between slavery and freedom. The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen-and this is what freedom means-is in a position to choose his own way of life.

Ludwig von Mises

The Slave must be made fit for his freedom by education and discipline, and thus made unfit for slavery. And as soon as he becomes unfit for slavery, the master will no longer desire to hold him as a slave.

Jefferson Davis

[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.