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.
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.
A monk is a man who considers himself one with all men because he seems constantly to see himself in every man.
All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.
What difference is there in the color of the soul?
I would by all means have men beware, lest Γsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
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