You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could y… - Pearl S. Buck

Well I know I am ugly and cannot be loved —

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

I don't know whether Abraham Lincoln knew exactly what he was doing when he freed the slaves. Perhaps he did it only as a war measure. The war, you remember, dragged along without any heart in it. Nobody seemed to want to fight. There was everything to fight for- the Union, the preservation of a country whole- but the idea of union, even of country, did not seem enough to make men want to fight... There were even plenty of people, accustomed to the small compact nations of Europe, who thought that perhaps this great expanse of America should not be one country, that it might be better if it were divided into nations instead of states. But others were determined that the continual bickering and quarreling between the little nations of Europe should not be repeated here and they were determined to keep the country whole and large, and among these was Abraham Lincoln.