This document discusses what imprisons and frees the human spirit through quotes and reflections on topics like fear, hate, love, hope, imagination, and freedom. It explores how forces beyond our control can take away what we possess but not our freedom to choose how we respond. It also reflects on how leaving behind bitterness and hatred can lead to freedom, and how darkness allows us to see the stars.

1. Freedom Speaks
Escaping prisons of mind, body, and spirit

2. fear
hate
tyranny
censorship
poverty
addiction
depression
disability
war
What imprisons us?

3. love
hope
forgiveness
democracy
courage
education
imagination
faith
gratitude
peace
What frees us?

4. Gianmaria Visconti
"Forces beyond your control can take away everything
you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose
how you will respond to the situation."
- Viktor Emil Frankl

5. Photo by Rüdiger Wölk, Münster.
"As I walked out the door toward the gate
that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I
didn't leave my bitterness and hatred
behind, I'd still be in prison."
- Nelson Mandela

6. "Only in the darkness
can you see the stars."
- Martin Luther King Jr.

7. "Hope -- Hope in the face of
difficulty. Hope in the face of
uncertainty. The audacity of hope!
In the end, that is God’s greatest
gift to us."
- Barack Obama

8. - From The Economist, Obituary,
Sept. 16th, 2006
"Deprived of pen and ink in
Hungary's Stalinist
concentration camp, Gyorgy
Faludy used a broom-bristle to
write in blood on toilet paper."

9. “Learn by heart this poem of mine;
books only last a little time
and this one will be borrowed, scarred,
burned by Hungarian border guards,”
- Gyorgy Faludy

10. “I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist
without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative
works without any restrictions.”
- Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

11. "Knowledge makes a man
unfit to be a slave."
- Frederick Douglass

12. “The internet is God's present to China. It is the best tool
for the Chinese people in their project to cast off slavery
and strive for freedom.”
- Liu Xiaobo, political prisoner and Nobel Laureate

13. "The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,
of things unknown, but longed for still,
and his tune is heard on the distant hill,
for the caged bird sings of freedom."
- Maya Angelou

14. Locked in his own body following a massive stroke,
Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote his autobiography by
blinking one eye.

15. "My diving bell becomes less oppressive,
and my mind takes flight like a butterfly."
- Jean-Dominique Bauby

16. Photo by Cameron Cassan
"Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn
the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free."
- Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

17. "I thank God for my handicaps.
For through them, I have found
myself, my work and my God."
- Helen Keller

18. "You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here
you have time to think about your soul."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich

19. “for Christ's sake, I delight in
weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in
persecutions, in difficulties. For when I
am weak, then I am strong.”
- Apostle Paul, 2 Cor. 6:10

20. Attitude

21. Communication

22. Imagination

23. Gratitude

24. Freedom