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2014 September 05
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"Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself." |
"Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason. But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines, and live their lives governed not by rules but by reason." |
"A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed,
nor attempts to govern others." |
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2014 September 04
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"Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward." |
"No man shall rule over me with my consent.
I will rule over no man." |
"It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own." |
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2014 September 03
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"May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe
it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all),
the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish
ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves,
and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form
which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded
exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened,
or opening, to the rights of man." |
"You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time." |
"Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late." |
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2014 September 02
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"In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers -- a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians -- a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should." |
"Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master." |
"Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble
and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!" |
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2014 September 01
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"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." |
"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." |
"I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the freeborn mind'. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none." |
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