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|  Peter Abelard | The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth. | |
| Henry Brooks Adams | Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation. | |
| Aristotle | What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others. | |
| Association of California School Administrators | 'Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. 'Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the 'wants' of a single family rather than the 'needs' of society. | |
| Nancy Astor | Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent. | |
| Carl Friedrich Bahrdt | The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | I'm a foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because the law makes them so. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Life, faculties, production -- in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation and are superior to it. | |
| Hilaire Belloc | [Heresy is] the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. | |
| Mark Berley | Political correctness is really a subjective list put together by the few to rule the many -- a list of things one must think, say, or do. It affronts the right of the individual to establish his or her own beliefs. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance -- these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. | |
| 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. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human. | |
| Andrew Bernstein | Altruism demands that an individual serve others, but doesn’t stipulate whether those others should be one’s family, or the homeless, or society as a whole. Collectivism states that, in politics, society comes first and the individual must obey. Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics. | |
| Andrew Bernstein | Collectivism is the political theory that states that the will of the people is omnipotent, an individual must obey; that society as a whole, not the individual, is the unit of moral value. ... Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics. | |
| Joseph L. Blau | Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice… | |
| Alan Bloom | Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities. | |
| Charles Bradlaugh | Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people. | |
| Nathaniel Branden | The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism ... | |
| Nathaniel Branden | Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights ... | |
| Justice William J. Brennan | If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. | |
| H. Jackson Brown, Jr. | People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. | |
| 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. | |
| Norman O. Brown | Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. | |
| 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. | |
| James Bryce | Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions. | |
| Pearl S. Buck | None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free. | |
| Edmund Burke | Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none. | |
| Edmund Burke | All men have equal rights, but not to equal things. | |
| Samuel Butler | He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still. | |
| Jimmy Carter | We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength. | |
| Willa Cather | The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten. | |
| Otis Chandler | Once we start to worry too often and too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency. | |
| Noam Chomsky | Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. | |
| Hillary Clinton | We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society. | |
| Morris R. Cohen | Small groups or communities may be far more oppressive to the individual than larger ones. Men are in many ways freer in large cities than in small villages. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions. | |
| Anthony Collins | By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas. | |
| Auguste Comte | Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions. | |
| Benjamin Constant | No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being... | |
| Benjamin Constant | First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word 'liberty'. For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death nor maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone's right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they or their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is more compatible with their inclinations or whims. Finally, it is everyone's right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed. Now compare this liberty with that of the ancients. The latter consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them. But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. | |
| James Fenimore Cooper | The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals. | |
| Harvey Cox | It is always the task of the intellectual to “think otherwise.” This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society. | |
| Judith Crist | What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother’s morals – only of his rights. | |
| Mark Da Cunha | Collectivism, unlike individualism, holds the group as the primary, and the standard of moral value. | |
| Alma Daniel | It is up to you to decide whether or not you’re ready to be free, really free.
This pertains to your relationship as well as your activities in the world.
You are limitless, if you choose that! Your freedom comes from letting go.
Freedom means empowerment to be, do, go, feel, whatever your heart tells you.
Only you have kept yourself from having this freedom out of some
misunderstanding of what your responsibilities really are.
Your responsibilities are to your Self. Serve that truly, fully, and you serve All. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action. | |
| Anthony de Jasay | ... the smaller the domain where choices among alternatives are made collectively, the smaller will be the probability that any individual's preference gets overruled. | |
| Salvador De Madariaga | He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power. | |
| Antoine De Saint-Exupery | True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man. | |
| Charles-Louis de Secondat | In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. | |
| Edward Debono | Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things a different way. | |
| Demosthenes | There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like. | |
| James Frank Dobie | Conform and be dull. | |
| John Dos Passos | Individuality is freedom lived. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and…the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience. | |
| William O. Douglas | The right to revolt has sources deep in our history. | |
| William O. Douglas | The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think. | |
| William O. Douglas | The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think. | |
| William O. Douglas | Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. | |
| Frederick Douglass | What is possible for me is possible for you. | |
| John Dryden | Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind. | |
| Wayne Dunn | The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a "psychological confession" on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive. | |
| Wayne Dunn | The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive. | |
| Will Durant | Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way. | |
| Friedrich Durrenmatt | The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all. | |
| Richard M. Ebeling | Who is the fascist? Individualism and the political philosophy of limited government is not only inconsistent with but is the
exact opposite of fascism and Nazism. Under fascism and Nazism, the state reigns supreme with absolute power over everyone and all forms of
property. It can well be asked: who is the fascist, when the president of the United States and many Democrats and Republicans in congress call for
expanded authority for the FBI and other federal security agencies to intrude into the lives of the American citizenry? Who is the fascist, when the
call is made for increased power for the FBI to undertake “roving wiretapping” or have easier access to the telephone and credit-card records of the
general population? Who is the fascist, when the proposal is made to make it easier for the FBI to investigate and infiltrate any political organization
or association because the government views it as a potential terrorist danger? | |
| Albert Einstein | Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual. | |
| Albert Einstein | It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed. | |
| Albert Einstein | The strength of the constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The less government we have the better - the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. | |
| Thomas I. Emerson | The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being. | |
| Thomas I. Emerson | Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature. | |
| Epictetus | The beginning of philosophy is the recognition of the conflict between opinions. | |
| Bergan Evans | The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. | |
| William Faulkner | Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. | |
| Marshall Field | If a blending of individualism and of cooperative participation is a prerequisite to a democratic solution of the problems of a society of free men, it must also be noted that an atmosphere of freedom is required if these problems are to be met constructively and as they arise. | |
| Financial Times | Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all. | |
| Abraham Flexner | We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Viktor Frankl | The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. | |
| Milton Friedman | Phil Donohue: When you see around the globe the maldistribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism? And whether greed is a good idea to run on?
Milton Friedman: Well first of all tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It's only the other fella that's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The greatest achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty that you are talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it's exactly in the kind of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
Phil Donohue: Seems to reward not virtue as much as the ability to manipulate the system.
Milton Friedman: And what does reward virtue? You think the Communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? Do you think... American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of political clout? Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know I think you are taking a lot of things for granted. And just tell me where in the world you find these angels that are going to organize society for us? Well, I don't even trust you to do that. | |
| Milton Friedman | The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it's in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they'll do you harm, why isn't it all right to say you must not eat too much because you'll do harm? Why isn't it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you're likely to die? Why isn't it all right to say, "Oh, skiing, that's no good, that's a very dangerous sport, you'll hurt yourself"? Where do you draw the line? | |
| Milton Friedman | The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights…This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another. | |
| Erich Fromm | The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group. | |
| Robert Frost | Freedom lies in being bold. | |
| Robert Frost | Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. | |
| Rick Gaber | The people in the MSM (mainstream media) don't think of themselves as liberal. They're just in favor of collectivism and against individualism in general -- without using many labels (or much thought) of any kind. They go out of their way only to mention a minority group if they can. Groupism is what they believe in. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. | |
| Helen H. Gardner | The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear. | |
| John W. Gardner | Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down. | |
| Onkar Ghate | Freedom is an intellectual achievement which requires disavowal of collectivism and embrace of individualism. | |
| Josiah William Gitt | Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Lose this day loitering
'Twill be the same old story,
Tomorrow and the next,
Even more dilatory.
Whatever you would do,
Or dream of doing, begin it!
Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it.
Begin it now. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Some books seem to have been written not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something. | |
| Rosalie M. Gordon | You can't make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent. | |
| Stephen Grabill | INDIVIDUALISM: The term 'individualism' has a great variety of meanings in social and political philosophy. There are at least three types that can be distinguished: (1) ontological individualism, (2) methodological individualism, and (3) moral or political individualism. Ontological individualism is the doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons who choose and act. Collectives, such as a social class, state, or a group, cannot act so they are not considered to have a reality independent of the actions of persons. Methodological individualists hold that the only genuinely scientific propositions in social science are those that can be reduced to the actions, dispositions, and decisions of individuals. Political or moral individualism is the theory that individuals should be left, as far as possible, to determine their own futures in economic and moral matters. Key thinkers include Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, John Locke, and Herbert Spencer. | |
| Edward Everett Hale | I am only one. But still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do. | |
| Louis J. Halle | If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself. | |
| Dag Hammarskjold | It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations. | |
| Caryl Parker Haskins | A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | ...the case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom. | |
| William Randolph Hearst | Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength. | |
| Helen Hegener | Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | The whole principle is wrong. It’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak. | |
| Lillian Hellman | Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? | |
| Ernest Hemingway | Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function. | |
| Ammon Hennacy | Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they? | |
| Ammon Hennacy | An anarchist is anyone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do. | |
| Ammon Hennacy | Force is the weapon of the weak. | |
| Auberon Herbert | True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties...The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force... No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element. | |
| Herman Hesse | Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism. | |
| Christopher Hitchens | The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state. | |
| Adolf Hitler | It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole. | |
| Adolf Hitler | It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own pride is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole; that pride and conceitedness, the feeling that the individual ... is superior, so far from being merely laughable, involve great dangers for the existence of the community that is a nation; that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and the will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of interests of the individual. ... By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men. | |
| Thomas Hobbes | A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. | |
| Eric Hoffer | There can be no freedom without freedom to fail. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay. | |
| Eric Hoffer | When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our lives. | |
| Paul Hollander | Another perceived attribute of intellectuals that needs rethinking and revision: the assumption that they are deeply and unequivocally committed to personal, political and intellectual freedom and especially free expression…many Western intellectuals’ commitment to intellectual freedom is selective at best. | |
| John Holt | No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back. | |
| John Holt | People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help. | |
| Homer | To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight. | |
| Elbert Hubbard | There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. | |
| Eric Idle | At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted. | |
| Illinois Supreme Court | It is precisely for the protection of the minority that constitutional limitations exist. Majorities need no such protection. They can take care of themselves. | |
| William Ralph Inge | It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men. | |
| Jeff Jacoby | The First Amendment says nothing about a right not to be offended.
The risk of finding someone else's speech offensive
is the price each of us pays for our own free speech.
Free people don't run to court -- or to the principal --
when they encounter a message they don't like.
They answer it with one of their own. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society. | |
| Chief Joseph | I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian... we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. | |
| Franz Kafka | I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. | |
| Sir Arthur Keith | As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs. | |
| Helen Keller | I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble. | |
| David Kelley | The case for a free society rests on individualism. ... Every form of totalitarianism has sought control over the minds of individuals, and has understood that it must first undermine the individual’s confidence in the validity of his own faculties. Remember O’Brien’s speech to Winston Smith in Orwell’s '1984' | |
| Alan Keyes | Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another. Our life of choices is a life-long labor to make ourselves into a person who has begun to respond adequately to the awesome gift we received from God when He made us in His image. | |
| Nikita Khrushchev | Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all. | |
| Rudyard Kipling | The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. | |
| Shawn E. Klein | Politically, true individualism means recognizing that one has a right to his own life and happiness. But it also means uniting with other citizens to preserve and defend the institutions that protect that right. | |
| Shawn E. Klein | The foundation of individualism lies in one's moral right to pursue one's own happiness. This pursuit requires a large amount of independence, initiative, and self-responsibility. But true individualism entails cooperating with others through trade, which facilitates the pursuit of each party's happiness, and which is carried out not just on the level of goods but on the level of knowledge and friendship. Trade is essential for life; it provides one with many of the goods and values one needs. Creating an environment where trade flourishes is of great importance and great interest for the individualist. | |
| Jeanne Knutson | In their tendencies toward tolerance, openmindedness, faith in people and lack of authoritarianism, selfactualizers do appear to possess psychic strengths which allow them to work well in situations marked by a diversity of viewpoints. | |
| William Kornhauser | Liberty requires restraints on popularly-elected leaders, as well as from minorities, so that the individual is protected from undue and arbitrary coercion by the state. These restraints are provided by a plurality of more or less equal and independent groups which check and balance one another's power. | |
| Paul Kurtz | Free inquiry requires that we tolerate diversity of opinion and that we respect the right of individuals to express their beliefs, however unpopular they may be, without social or legal prohibition or fear of success. | |
| Karen Kwiatkowski | Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades. . . .<br><br>
I believe our government -- outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name -- cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law and liberty.<br><br>
That's why on Sept. 11, I will not be celebrating America's undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God's intent for America.<br><br>
On this 10-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I'll be in Charlottesville, Va., learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I'll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the Sept. 11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.<br><br>
The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities. | |
| Lao-Tzu | The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself. | |
| D. H. Lawrence | I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual? | |
| Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. | |
| C. S. Lewis | It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. | |
| Joseph Lewis | The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. | |
| Georg Christoph Lichtenberg | One's first step in wisdom is to question everything -- and one's last is to come to terms with everything. | |
| Joshua Liebman | Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. | |
| Lawrence Lindsey | Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all. | |
| Walter Lippmann | The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively. | |
| Marios Vargas Llosa | Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway, you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits. | |
| James Madison | With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. | |
| James Madison | There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. | |
| Rollo May | Human freedom involves the capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. | |
| Margaret Mead | My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. | |
| Herman Melville | It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own
government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within
the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority. | |
| H. L. Mencken | All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself. | |
| Thomas Merton | I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself.
If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful,
a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions,
perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival. | |
| Frank Straus Meyer | The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. ... Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. | |
| John Stuart Mill | If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that person that he, if he had the power, would be in silencing mankind… If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. | |
| John Stuart Mill | And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. | |
| John Stuart Mill | That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. | |
| Henry Miller | No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance. | |
| Alanna Mitchell | Jim Creechan, a University of Alberta sociologist, said some of the love of guns may have its roots in Alberta's pervasive free-enterprise model of behaviour. 'It's the whole idea that the individual is more important than the collective.' | |
| Thomas Molnar | Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder. | |
| Christopher Darlington Morley | There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it. | |
| Wayne Morse | The liberal insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the State his servant. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, Liberalism, and Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains; and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was the century of individualism (Liberalism always signifying individualism) it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State. It is a perfectly logical deduction that a new doctrine can utilize all the still vital elements of previous doctrines. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Against individualism, the fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man... | |
| Huey P. Newton | My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual … who … can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government. | |
| George O'Neil | When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone. | |
| George Orwell | At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. | |
| Thomas Paine | I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. | |
| Georges Palante | L'individualisme est une doctrine qui, au lieu de subordonner l'individu à la collectivité, pose en principe que l'individu a sa fin en lui-même; qu'en fait et en droit il possède une valeur propre et une existence autonome, et que l'idéal social est le plus complet affranchissement de l'individu. L'individualisme ainsi compris est la même chose que ce qu'on appelle encore la philosophie sociale libertaire. | |
| Mario Palmieri | Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position. | |
| Jean Paul | Individuality is to be preserved and respected everywhere, as the root of everything good. | |
| Pat Paulsen | Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles. | |
| Westbrook Pegler | Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive. | |
| Pennsylvania Gazette | The loyalists in the beginning of the late war objected to associating, arming and fighting, in defense of our liberties, because these measures were not constitutional. A free people should always be left... with every possible power to promote their own happiness. | |
| Fritz Perls | Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self esteem. If you need encouragement, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge. | |
| Dr. Chester Pierce | Every child in America who enters school at the age of five is
mentally ill, because he comes to school with an allegiance toward
our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our
institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government that
we have. Patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty, all that proves that
children are sick because a truly well individual is one who has
rejected all of those things, and is truly the international child of
the future. | |
| Everett Piper | History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of "self-evident truths" grounded in the "laws of nature and nature's God," every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, "You shall know the truth and the
truth shall set you free. | |
| Titus Maccius Plautus | Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired. | |
| Sir Karl Popper | There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions… It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory. | |
| Dennis Prager | To the students and faculty of our high school:
I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people.
I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country.
First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships.
The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity -- your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American. This is an American public school, and American public schools were created to make better Americans.
If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity-, race- and non-American nationality-based celebrations. They undermine the motto of America, one of its three central values -- e pluribus unum, "from many, one." And this school will be guided by America's values.
This includes all after-school clubs. I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness.
Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism -- an unhealthy preoccupation with the self -- while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry and more. If the only extracurricular activities you can imagine being interesting in are those based on ethnic, racial or sexual identity, that means that little outside of yourself really interests you.
Second, I am uninterested in whether English is your native language. My only interest in terms of language is that you leave this school speaking and writing English as fluently as possible. The English language has united America's citizens for over 200 years, and it will unite us at this school. It is one of the indispensable reasons this country of immigrants has always come to be one country. And if you leave this school without excellent English language skills, I would be remiss in my duty to ensure that you will be prepared to successfully compete in the American job market. We will learn other languages here -- it is deplorable that most Americans only speak English -- but if you want classes taught in your native language rather than in English, this is not your school.
Third, because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor, everything in this school will reflect learning's elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for Hollywood events than for church or school. These people have their priorities backward. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school.
Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school's property -- whether in class, in the hallways or at athletic events. If you can't speak without using the f-word, you can't speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission, plus epithets such as [the 'N' word], even when used by one black student to address another black, or 'bitch,' even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few your age to instinctively distinguish between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene.
Fifth, we will end all self-esteem programs. In this school, self-esteem will be attained in only one way -- the way people attained it until decided otherwise a generation ago -- by earning it. One immediate consequence is that there will be one valedictorian, not eight.
Sixth, and last, I am reorienting the school toward academics and away from politics and propaganda. No more time will be devoted to scaring you about smoking and caffeine, or terrifying you about sexual harassment or global warming. No more semesters will be devoted to condom wearing and teaching you to regard sexual relations as only or primarily a health issue. There will be no more attempts to convince you that you are a victim because you are not white, or not male, or not heterosexual or not Christian. We will have failed if any one of you graduates this school and does not consider him or herself inordinately lucky -- to be alive and to be an American.
Now, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our country. As many of you do not know the words, your teachers will hand them out to you. | |
| Marcel Proust | We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can make for us or spare us. | |
| Proverb | Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark. | |
| Snell Putney | There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views. Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox... They stimulate the climate of controversy without which political democracy becomes an empty formalism. | |
| 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 is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man's life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the altruist morality. | |
| Ayn Rand | Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. | |
| Ayn Rand | I swear by my life, and love of it,
that I will never live for the sake of another man,
nor ask another man to live for mine. | |
| 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 is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man's life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the altruist morality. | |
| Ayn Rand | Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members. | |
| Ayn Rand | A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. | |
| Ayn Rand | Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living." I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force." Which means: political freedom. | |
| Ayn Rand | Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need. | |
| Ayn Rand | It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government's right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases. This time, it was not in the name of the "divine right of kings," but in the name of the divine right of the masses. The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government. | |
| Jonathan Rauch | A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It´s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free. | |
| Ronald Reagan | You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.' | |
| Dr. Lawrence W. Reed | When the socialist economies of Eastern Europe disintegrated, the cause was evident to nearly everyone: the stifling directives of central planning had all but obliterated individual initiative and accountability. The cure was just as obvious: a healthy dose of entrepreneurship and private enterprise. | |
| David Reisman | The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other. | |
| Ernest Renan | To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes. | |
| Sheldon Richman | Among other grand achievements, F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism. One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge—information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state. | |
| Alfredo Rocco | For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends. | |
| John D. Rockefeller, Sr. | The combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return. | |
| John D. Rockefeller, Sr. | In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.
We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen -- of whom we have an ample supply.
The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Andrei Sakharov | Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships. | |
| Andrei Sakharov | Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas. | |
| Eric Schaub | By a Declaration, Liberty is born.
With Courage she is nourished, and
with unceasing Commitment she is guarded. | |
| Eric Schaub | I am not free until I say so.
And there's a good chance
I am going to have to fight once I do.
Ever since I declared my Independence,
I have had to support and defend it. | |
| Peter Schwartz | The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective -- the race -- is the source of his identity and value. ... The notion of 'diversity' entails exactly the same premises as racism -- that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What is freedom? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any restraint, to any chance. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples? There are no limits to our greed, none to our cruelty. And as long as such crimes are committed by stealth and by individuals, they are less harmful and less portentous; but cruelties are practised in accordance with acts of senate and popular assembly, and the public is bidden to do that which is forbidden to the individual. Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret, are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out. Man, naturally the gentlest class of being, is not ashamed to revel in the blood of others, to wage war, and to entrust the waging of war to his sons, when even dumb beasts and wild beasts keep the peace with one another. Against this overmastering and widespread madness philosophy has become a matter of greater effort, and has taken on strength in proportion to the strength which is gained by the opposition forces. | |
| Ben Shahn | Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | [A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Power, like a desolating pestilence,\\
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,\\
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,\\
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,\\
A mechanized automaton. | |
| Ignazio Silone | Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying “No” to any authority -- literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political. | |
| Dame Edith Sitwell | I am not eccentric. It’s just that I’m more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish. | |
| Samuel Smiles | Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth,--the result of free individual action, energy, and independence. | |
| Adam Smith | By pursuing his own interest [every individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. | |
| Adam Smith | The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations. | |
| Adam Smith | How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. | |
| Gerry Spence | The Internet…has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction. | |
| Stephen Spender | What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent. | |
| Lysander Spooner | The 'nations,' as they are called, with whom our pretended ambassadors, secretaries, presidents, and senators profess to make treaties, are as much myths as our own. On general principles of law and reason, there are no such 'nations.' ... Our pretended treaties, then, being made with no legitimate or bona fide nations, or representatives of nations, and being made, on our part, by persons who have no legitimate authority to act for us, have intrinsically no more validity than a pretended treaty made by the Man in the Moon with the king of the Pleiades. | |
| Lysander Spooner | Vices are not crimes. | |
| Charles T. Sprading | Does it not seem a vast waste of valuable human material that the pioneers of thought, those who by their genius dare to clear unknown paths in the arts and sciences and in government, should have to conform to the dictates of that non-creative, slow-moving mass, the majority? An appeal to the majority is a resort to force and not an appeal to intelligence; the majority is always ignorant, and by increasing the majority we multiply ignorance. The majority is incapable of initiative, its attitude being one of opposition toward everything that is new. If it had been left to the majority, the world would never have had the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, or any of the conveniences of modern life. | |
| John Steinbeck | And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve it’s high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for understanding. | |
| Max Stirner | The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime. | |
| Max Stirner | A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists. | |
| Prof. Clifford Thies | Thus, individualism is not antithetical to community. Rather, it can involve free association and a belief in an over-arching harmony of interests. In a free socety, individuals join with others because of love and mutual benefit, not because they are programmed or coerced. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. | |
| James Thornton | Before the creation of the welfare state, immigrants who came to this country were for the most part attracted by America’s
reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity. Laws and customs that then prevailed required immigrants to carve out their individual destinies by
their own labor, perseverance, intelligence, and determination. | |
| Charles W. Tobey | The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals. | |
| G. M. Trevelyan | Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the blood of real civilization. | |
| Mark Twain | Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. | |
| Unknown | On the surface of the world right now there is
War and violence and things seem dark.
But calmly and quietly, at the same time,
Something else is happening underground.
An inner revolution is taking place
And certain individuals are being called to a higher light.
It is a silent revolution.
From the inside out. From the ground up.
This is a Global operation.
A Spiritual Conspiracy.
There are sleeper cells in every nation on the planet.
You won't see us on the TV.
You won't read about us in the newspaper.
You won't hear about us on the radio.
We don't seek any glory.
We don't wear any uniform.
We come in all shapes and sizes, colors and styles.
Most of us work anonymously.
We are quietly working behind the scenes
In every country and culture of the world
Cities big and small, mountains and valleys,
In farms and villages, tribes and remote islands.
You could pass by one of us on the street
And not even notice.
We go undercover.
We remain behind the scenes.
It is of no concern to us who takes the final credit
But simply that the work gets done.
Occasionally we spot each other in the street.
We give a quiet nod and continue on our way.
During the day many of us pretend we have normal jobs
But behind the false storefront at night
Is where the real work takes place.
Some call us the Conscious Army.
We are slowly creating a new world
With the power of our minds and hearts.
We follow, with passion and joy
Our orders come from the Central Spiritual Intelligence.
We are dropping soft, secret love bombs when no one is looking
Poems ~ Hugs ~ Music ~ Photography ~ Movies ~ Kind words ~
Smiles ~ Meditation and prayer ~ Dance ~ Social activism ~ Websites
Blogs ~ Random acts of kindness...
We each express ourselves in our own unique ways
With our own unique gifts and talents.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
That is the motto that fills our hearts.
We know it is the only way real transformation takes place.
We know that quietly and humbly we have the
Power of all the oceans combined.
Our work is slow and meticulous
Like the formation of mountains.
It is not even visible at first glance.
And yet with it entire tectonic plates
Shall be moved in the centuries to come.
Love is the new religion of the 21st century.
You don't have to be a highly educated person
Or have any exceptional knowledge to understand it.
It comes from the intelligence of the heart
Embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Nobody else can do it for you.
We are now recruiting.
Perhaps you will join us
Or already have.
All are welcome.
The door is open. | |
| John Updike | The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. | |
| Paul Valéry | Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations. | |
| Paul Valéry | The world acquires value only through its extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Mark Van Doren | To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in. | |
| Ludwig Von Mises | The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society,
nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society.
The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears. | |
| Josiah Warren | To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation -- a madness which would be only equaled by requiring all men to possess the same countenance, the same voice or the same stature. | |
| Daniel Webster | There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today. | |
| Simone Weil | Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. | |
| Robert Welch | I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others, so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me. I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards, so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled. Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold, or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops, or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods, or of compelling us to save money or to spend it, or of telling us when or whether we can pray. I do not want government or laws designed for any other form of welfarism or paternalism, based on the premise that government knows best and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves. And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance, is implicit in these aspirations and ideals. | |
| Robert Welch | The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. | |
| Oscar Wilde | The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. ... One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great, individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist ... | |
| Oscar Wilde | Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress had been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. | |
| 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. | |
| Glenn Woiceshyn | One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights. | |
| Glenn Woiceshyn | The antipode of individualism is collectivism, which subordinates the individual to the group -- be it the 'community,' the tribe, the race, the proletariat, etc. A person's moral worth is judged by how much he sacrifices himself to the group. [Under collectivism] the more emergencies (and victims) the better, because they provide more opportunity for 'virtue'. | |
| Glenn Woiceshyn | One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights. | |
| Frank Zappa | Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence. | |
| Frank Zappa | Rock music was never written for or performed for conservative tastes. | |
| Carl Zwanzig | Duct tape is like 'the Force'. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together. | |
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