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2013 January 04
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"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." |
"There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men." |
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2013 January 03
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"For it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for,
and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy." |
"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." |
"A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence." |
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2013 January 02
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"The first people totalitarians destroy or silence
are men of ideas and free minds." |
"These are the days when men of all social disciplines and
all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted;
when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence;
when originality is taken to be a mark of instability;
and when, in minor modification of the original parable,
the bland lead the bland." |
"Always stand on principle, even if you stand alone." |
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2013 January 01
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"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." |
"There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty --
the restraint of law and that of custom.
No written law has ever been more binding than
unwritten custom supported by popular opinion." |
"...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." |
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2012 December 31
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"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be
no more urgent task than to come to understand the
mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.
These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies,
much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom'
to which we are subjected and which all too often
we serve as willing or unwitting instruments." |
"The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical,
to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts." |
"The majority of us are for free speech
when it deals with subjects concerning
which we have no intense feelings." |
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