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| Edward Abbey | Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward. | |
| John Adams | Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. | |
| Aeschylus | For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends. | |
| Aesop | Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want. | |
| Jann Arden | The first step to truly living a good and fearless life, is accepting responsibility for your actions. Accepting what part you had in any situation. Difficult, to say the least, but liberating. | |
| Hannah Arendt | The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. | |
| Hannah Arendt | Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor—coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another. | |
| Aristotle | The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless. | |
| Aung San Suu Kyi | The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies. | |
| Walter Bagehot | So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. | |
| Dan Baum | The country's first drug ban explicitly targeted the opium of "the heathen Chinee." Cocaine was first banned in the south to prevent an uprising of hopped-up "cocainized Negroes. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Heathen, n. A benighten creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. | |
| Daniel Boorstin | We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. | |
| William E. Borah | Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees. | |
| James A. C. Brown | There exists a “fear of freedom” of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate. | |
| Sir Thomas Browne | The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority. | |
| Giordano Bruno | It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. | |
| John "Birdman" Bryant | If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave. | |
| Buddha | The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed. | |
| Edmund Burke | No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. | |
| Edmund Burke | The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion. | |
| Edmund Burke | Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. | |
| Robert Burns | Dare to be honest and fear no labor. | |
| George W. Bush | We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans,
and confront the worst threats before they emerge. | |
| George W. Bush | We have every reason to assume the worst. | |
| George W. Bush | Today the Justice Department did issue a blanket alert. It was in recognition of a general threat we received. This is not the first time the Justice Department have acted like this. I hope it is the last. But given the attitude of the evildoers, it may not be. | |
| George W. Bush | We will fight with full force and might of the United States military. | |
| George W. Bush | Saddam Hussein's regime is a gray and gathering danger. | |
| George W. Bush | The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance
in the campaign against terror.
We've removed an ally of al Qaeda. | |
| George W. Bush | And our security will require all Americans
to be forward-looking and resolute,
to be ready for pre-emptive action. | |
| George W. Bush | There will be no going back to the era before September 11th, 2001, to false comfort in a dangerous world. | |
| George W. Bush | Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. | |
| George W. Bush | Our enemies are a radical network of terrorists --
and every government that supports them. | |
| George W. Bush | We're too great a nation to allow the evildoers to affect our soul. | |
| Nicholas Murray Butler | The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously. | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | Men willingly believe what they wish. | |
| John Cage | I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. | |
| William J. Campbell | Today the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury. | |
| Albert Camus | Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. | |
| Jimmy Carter | If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement. | |
| E. H. Chapin | At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent. | |
| Chinese Proverb | If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. | |
| Paulo Coelho | The person who is right is the person who is the strongest, in this case, paradoxically, it's the cowards who are the brave ones, and they manage to impose their ideas on everyone else. | |
| Marvin Cooley | We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Love of justice in the generality of men is only the fear of suffering from injustice. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word. | |
| William O. Douglas | Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin. | |
| Theodore M. Drange | Some methodological atheists formulate the principle by saying that the burden of proof is always on any person making an existence claim, since, from a logical point of view, existence claims are only capable of proof, not disproof. No one has ever proven the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or elves, or unicorns, or anything else, simply because the very logic of an unrestricted existential proposition prohibits its disproof. It is impossible to go all over the universe and show that, for example, there are no elves anywhere. For this reason, rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of all those things which have never been shown to exist. That is why we all regard it rational to deny the existence of Santa Claus, elves, unicorns, etc. And since God is in that same category, having never been shown to exist, it follows that rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of God. | |
| John J. Dunphy | I steadfastly maintain that only with the complete, irrevocable
rejection of God and the supernatural will humankind truly begin to live.
Rather than producing a feeling of despair, the decision to embrace atheism
should result in an exhilarating, almost intoxicating sense of freedom,
something akin to the experience of those American slaves who rejoiced upon
hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Only the atheist is
truly free. | |
| Albert Einstein | The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. | |
| W. Vaughn Ellsworth | Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors.
He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose,
they might take my property or confiscate my earnings,
what would my family do, how would they survive?'
He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that
the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty! | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. | |
| Konnilyn G. Feig | Man is deeply vulnerable when faced with overwhelming evil. Instead of consolidating his energy to fight it, he wastes valuable time and effort puzzling over it, insisting it is not, cannot possibly be, what it seems. | |
| Marilyn Ferguson | Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom. | |
| E. M. Forster | We are willing enough to praise freedom
when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance.
In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee,
we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. | |
| Louis Freeh | If you ask Americans whether they want an FBI wire tax in their phone bill, they'll say, “No.” If I ask them whether they want a feature on their telephone which allows me to find their child, if they're taken, they'll say, “Yes.” I think it's a question of perception. | |
| Maurice Freehill | Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light? | |
| Sigmund Freud | A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity. | |
| Erich Fromm | If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it. | |
| Erich Fromm | If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated. | |
| Rocco Galati | 19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society. | |
| Galileo Galilei | I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Hermann Goering | Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. | |
| Alan Greenspan | Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | A nation, which can prefer appeasement over danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one. | |
| Heinrich Heine | Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. | |
| Claude-Adrien Helvetius | To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves. | |
| Hindu Saying | Pitiful is the one who, fearing failure, makes no beginning. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Being daily better informed about their knowledge than my adversaries themselves, I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force. | |
| Adolf Hitler | The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. | |
| Sergei Hoff | Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities? | |
| Eric Hoffer | The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor. | |
| Eric Hoffer | To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility. | |
| Eric Hoffer | It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. | |
| Herbert Hoover | It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice. | |
| Herbert Hoover | Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains. | |
| Horace | Who then is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains,
firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been
rounded off and polished. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Question with boldness even the existence of a God;
because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blind-folded fear...
Do not be frightened from this inquiry
from any fear of its consequences.
If it ends in the belief that there is no God,
you will find incitements to virtue
in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared ... We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude ... The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public money. We are endeavoring to reduce the government to the practice of rigid economy to avoid burdening the people ... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us ... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | And, finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Gerald W. Johnson | We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome. | |
| Ernest Jones | [Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses. | |
| Otto Hermann Kahn | The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. | |
| Helen Keller | Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. | |
| Jamaica Kincaid | Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. | |
| Henry Kissinger | We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing. | |
| Paul Krugman | ...instead it seems that business -- like weight loss -- is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility. | |
| Harold J. Laski | No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism. | |
| William Lenoir | We are told there is no cause to fear. When we consider the great powers of Congress, there is great cause of alarm. They can disarm the militia. If they were armed, they would be a resource against great oppressions. The laws of a great empire are difficult to be executed. If the laws of the union were oppressive, they could not carry them into effect, if the people were possessed of the proper means of defence. | |
| Max Lerner | The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press:\\
\\
- Concentrated Power of the Big Press. \\
- Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. \\
- Governmental control of the press. \\
- Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. \\
- Big Business mentality. \\
- Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. \\
- Social blindness. | |
| C. S. Lewis | We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. | |
| Robert Lindner | Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt. | |
| John Locke | New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. | |
| Mary Lyon | There is nothing in the universe that I fear, but that I shall not know all my duty, or shall fail to do it. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the
exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. | |
| Carey McWilliams | Whatever the individual motives of the censors may be, censorship is a form of social control. It is a means of holding a society together, of arresting the flux which censors fear. And since the fear cannot be appeased, the demands for censorship mount in volume and intensity. And one form of censorship can easily lead to other forms. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings. | |
| H. L. Mencken | What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals
by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. | |
| Dr. Joseph Mengele | The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it. | |
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | Let us forget such words, and all they mean, as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed, Intolerance, Bigotry. Let us renew our faith and pledge to Man, his right to be Himself, and free. | |
| Henry Miller | Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. | |
| Charles Langbridge Morgan | A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face... one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. | |
| Huey P. Newton | There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively -- I am one with the people. | |
| Huey P. Newton | We felt that the police needed a label, a label other than that fear image that they carried in the community. So we used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police. And it worked. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word “justice” into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play. | |
| John Osborne | Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice. | |
| Thomas Paine | Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system. | |
| Thomas Paine | Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. | |
| Thomas Paine | All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. | |
| Thomas Paine | The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance. | |
| Thomas Paine | Freedom had been hunted round the globe;
reason was considered as rebellion;
and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.
But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks,
and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. | |
| Thomas Paine | But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant. | |
| Thomas Paine | He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression;
for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. | |
| Kort E. Patterson | According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them. | |
| Kort E. Patterson | Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed the propaganda… Some denounced their enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves…Some were motivated by the sense of power turning in their neighbors gave them. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions... Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions. | |
| Plato | Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool. | |
| Plato | The worst of all deceptions is self-deception. | |
| Santo Presti | Fear is the key element for the IRS in achieving its mission. Without fear, the IRS would have a difficult time maintaining our so-called system of voluntary compliance ... | |
| Ayn Rand | The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, [but that his use of brutality was] the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. | |
| John Randolph | The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it. | |
| H. L. Richardson | When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated. | |
| Ernst Rohm | Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive. | |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself. | |
| Bertrand Russell | To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. | |
| Willy Russell | I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun. | |
| Carl Sagan | There is a lurking fear that some things are not meant “to be known,” that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make. | |
| Eric Schaub | Americans find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. America is the land of the free and home of the brave -- we don't need a Patriot Act, because we are already patriots. We know freedom means responsibility, but I am not sure Congress and its domestic enforcement agencies do. More often than not, new security measures enacted by the government have resulted in more violations of the citizenry than terrorists have ever done. The terrorists want us to be afraid -- well, we are not afraid. Stop wasting dollars on this program -- it is not good for America. To give up essential liberty for a little security provides neither. The right to be left alone from government intrusion is the beginning of all freedoms. | |
| Friedrich Schiller | No, there is a limit to the tyrant's power! \\
When the oppressed man finds no justice, \\
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals \\
With fearless heart to Heaven, \\
And thence brings down his everlasting rights, \\
Which there abide, inalienably his, \\
And indestructible as stars themselves. \\
The primal state of nature reappears, \\
Wherein man confronts his fellow man; \\
And if all other means shall fail his need, \\
One last resort remains—his own good sword. \\
The dearest of our goods we may defend From violence. \\
We stand before our country, \\
We stand before our wives, before our children!\\ | |
| Ken Schoolland | For thousands of years, the tireless effort of productive men and women has been spent trying to reduce the distance between communities of the world by reducing the costs of commerce and trade. Over the same span of history, the slothful and incompetent protectionist has endlessly sought to erect barriers in order to prohibit competition—thus, effectively moving communities farther apart. When trade is cut off entirely, the real producers may as well be on different planets. The protectionist represents the worst in humanity: fear of change, fear of challenge, and the jealous envy of genius. The protectionist is not against the use of every kind of force, even warfare, to crush his rival. If mankind is to survive, then these primeval fears must be defeated. | |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | All truth passes through 3 stages.\\
First, it is ridiculed.\\
Second, it is violently opposed.\\
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Laws do not persuade
just because they threaten. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Worse than war is the very fear of war. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Remember, however, before all else, to strip things of all that disturbs and confuses, and to see what each is at bottom; you will then comprehend that they contain nothing fearful except the actual fear. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | The State…has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives. | |
| William Shakespeare | True nobility is exempt from fear. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may as well not say it at all because people will not trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live. | |
| Gerry Spence | A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals’ rights – which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state. | |
| Herbert Spencer | The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.
No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develope their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. | |
| Jarrett Stepman | So, what the cultural elites are doing is what plenty of other authoritarian and totalitarian societies have done in the past. They are making the cost of telling the truth high enough that a general mass of people will be afraid to declare it publicly or even privately. | |
| John Stockwell | Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. | |
| Joseph Story | Men, to act with vigour and effect, must have time to mature measures, and judgment and experience, as to the best method of applying them. They must not be hurried on to their conclusions by the passions, or the fears of the multitude. They must deliberate, as well as resolve. | |
| Amy Tan | You see what power is -- holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them! | |
| Tecumseh | Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.\\
Trouble no one about his religion.\\
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.\\
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.\\
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.\\
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.\\
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.\\
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.\\
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. \\
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.\\
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.\\
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.\\
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless. | |
| James A. Traficant, Jr. | America is in trouble... not from without, but from within! The Central Government has become too powerful. Citizens fear the Government. This is wrong. This is dangerous! I know the Government covered-up and promulgated LIES about Waco, Ruby Ridge, Pan Am Flight 103, Hoffa, and J.F.K. The Government knew I was right when I called Janet Reno a traitor. Janet Reno sold us out when she refused to investigate a $10-million payoff to the Democratic Party from a general in the Red Chinese Army (no less!). Think about it! And the Government knew that I had known why Reno was forced to betray America! I’m proud that I tried to do something about it! Someday the truth will come out. (I hope China never attacks us!) | |
| Harry S. Truman | Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. | |
| Mark Twain | Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. | |
| Mark Twain | It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many people can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval. | |
| Hendrik van Loon | Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession -- their ignorance. | |
| Voltaire | Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. | |
| William Von Raab | There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom. | |
| George Washington | If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide. … Republicans and Democrats – red, yellow, black and white – have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility. … It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator. And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what’s immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within. And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does. | |
| Oscar Wilde | To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. | |
| Tad Williams | We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know,
afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us.
But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger. | |
| Marianne Williamson | And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. | |
| Albert Wohlstetter | Almost everyone seems concerned with the need to relax tension. However, relaxation of tension, which everyone thinks is good, is not easily distinguished from relaxing one's guard, which almost everyone thinks is bad. Relaxation, like Miltown, is not an end in itself. Not all danger comes from tension. The reverse relation, to be tense where there is danger, is only rational. | |
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