freedom22 quotes

“If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do.”

“But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

“Of the gladest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood....afresh dawns the morn of life…”

“Everyone wants everything to be free and available and easy, but then they want everything to be protected and safe and guaranteed as well, and then they also want everything to be valuable and esteemed and recognized as worthy. If you are a genuine outcast, then you will be cast out. You cannot be a normal weirdo, a mainstream deviant. It is one or the other. The life of a mutant criminal freak who has to outrun and outwit power, or a normal conforming person with everyday habits and interests.”

“Pretend you are an atheist in the Middle Ages. How would you have managed? You could have kept quiet and pretended to go along with the dominant beliefs, you could have expressed your disagreements and doubts in code or obliquely through art, or you could have spoken up and challenged the consensus and demanded recognition of your minority views.

Those are still your options. Most likely you will not be strung up by your testicles or impaled or crucified or burned at the stake or have molten lead poured down your throat or have your fingertips smashed. You probably will not be buried up to your neck in the hot desert sand with your eyelids cut off so the sun cooks your eyeballs and you probably will not have your head slathered in honey so ants and flies eat your face.”

“To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.”

“Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.

I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”

“The subject is he who opens his eyes to human weakness and organizes society in a way that responds to this reality. Instead of unconsciously assimilating his heritage like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his heritage like the contemporary individual, he recognizes that he is an heir. Instead of remaining submerged in his world like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his world like the contemporary individual, he engages himself in this world. Engagement and the recognition of one’s heritage are expressions of accepted finiteness even within the quest for freedom.”

“Building on liberalism’s successes means recognizing both the legitimacy of its initial appeal and the deeper reasons for its failure. It means offering actual human liberty in the form of both civic and individual self-rule, not the ersatz version that combines systemic powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual license.”

“Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridicial defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. It’s two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity.”

“What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is instead transforming us, making us into creatures to which many, if not most of us, have not given our ‘consent’. It is making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism supposed was our nature in that ‘state of nature’ that existed before the coming of civilization, law, and government. Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.”

“Real conversation is an undirected engagement in which one distinctive voice is not reduced to another (there is, Oakeshott said, no ‘symposiarch’ or ‘arbiter’,’ no mode of all the modes), and by means of which human being discovers and distinguishes itself from all other being. The conversational prospect is where a glorious realization of the inherent freedom of the human spirit can appear.”

“A human being is not a waxen rubbing, a lifeless imprint taken from some great stony face. Rather he is a Minuteman or a dog soldier at liberty to use the inclinations of the past as he sees fit. He is free to perceive the matrix, and, within his limits, change from it. By seeing both the futility in trying to relive the old life and the danger in trying to obliterate it, man can gain the capacity to make anew. His very form depends not on repetition but upon variation from old patterns. In response to stress, biological survival requires genetic change; it necessitates a turning away from doomed replication. And what of history? Was it different?”

“Reason is Thought determining itself in absolute freedom.”

“Napoleon’s contradictory interventions showed that rights need not be seen as forming a single package. He introduced religious toleration and equal civil and political rights for religious minorities wherever he ruled. Yet at home in France, he severely limited everyone’s freedom of speech and basically eliminated freedom of the press. The French emperor believed that ‘Men are not born to be free...Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.’ The French did not desire true liberty, in his view; they simply aspired to rise to the top of society. They would sacrifice their political rights in order to ensure their legal equality.”

“Today we have largely done away with such customs and like to make fun of what seem to us to be pointless traditions. But the question is whether instead of the supposed freedom we have gained (in this case, the choice of wedding days), we have lost in the bargain a framework for life that these customs provided. At the very least we have created more problems for our-selves.”

“‘It is true,’ said Sandy, ‘many have left this life. But I will never leave it. To leave this life is to scorn the life of my parents, to say there is something superior to that life. Of course, we can do things to improve. We should educate our children, so they can understand better how to treat the animals, how to work with people in the city. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon this life. To be a Tuareg is to be a herder.

We are free and independent. We walk differently from the people in the town. Our life is a good one, as long as there is pasture, water and security. It is the best life I know.’”

“The American project—a phrase you will see again in the chapters to come—consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans, that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American wants to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured. That culture is unraveling.”

“Freedom begins for an individual the moment he or she chooses to do the right thing without calculating the consequences.”

“Every man has the power to choose, but no man has the power to escape the necessity of choice.”

“To raise myself so far as may be even now to this state of happiness, strength, and freedom, I perceive myself in lofty contemplation. I consider the order of the universe, not to explain it by any futile system, but to revere it without ceasing, to adore the wise Author who reveals himself in it. I hold intercourse with him, I immerse all my powers in his divine essence; I am overwhelmed by his kindness, I bless him and his gifts, but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him—to change the order of nature, to work miracles on my behalf? Should I, who am bound to love all things the order of which he has established in his wisdom and maintained by his providence, should I desire the disturbance of that order on my own account? No, that rash prayer would deserve to be punished rather than to be granted. Neither do I ask of him the power to do right; why should I ask what he has given me already! Has he not given me conscience that I may love the right, reason that I may perceive it, and freedom that I may choose it? If I do evil I have no excuse, I do it of my own free will, to ask him to change my will is to ask him to do what he asks of me; it is to want him to do the work while I get the wages; to be dissatisfied with my lot is to wish to be no longer a man, to wish to be other than what I am, to wish for disorder and evil. Thou source of justice and truth, merciful and gracious God, in thee do I trust, and the desire of my hear is—Thy will be done. When I unite my will with thine, I do what thou doest, I have a share in they goodness, I believe that I enjoy beforehand the supreme happiness which is the reward of goodness.”

‘Χρώμεθα γὰρ πολιτείᾳ οὐ ζηλούσῃ τοὺς τῶν πέλας νόμους, παράδειγμαδὲ μᾶλλον αὐτοὶ ὄντες τισὶν ἢ μιμούμενοι ἑτέρους. Καὶ ὄνομα μὲν διὰ τὸμὴ ἐς ὀλίγους ἀλλ᾽ ἐς πλείονας οἰκεῖν δημοκρατία κέκληται: μέτεστι δὲκατὰ μὲν τοὺς νόμους πρὸς τὰ ἴδια διάφορα πᾶσι τὸ ἴσον, κατὰ δὲ τὴνἀξίωσιν, ὡς ἕκαστος ἔν τῳ εὐδοκιμεῖ, οὐκ ἀπὸ μέρους τὸ πλέον ἐς τὰ κοινὰἢ ἀπ᾽ ἀρετῆς προτιμᾶται, οὐδ᾽ αὖ κατὰ πενίαν, ἔχων γέ τι ἀγαθὸν δρᾶσαιτὴν πόλιν, ἀξιώματος ἀφανείᾳ κεκώλυται. Ἐλευθέρως δὲ τά τε πρὸς τὸκοινὸν πολιτεύομεν καὶ ἐς τὴν πρὸς ἀλλήλους τῶν καθ᾽ ἡμέρανἐπιτηδευμάτων ὑποψίαν, οὐ δι᾽ ὀργῆς τὸν πέλας, εἰ καθ᾽ ἡδονήν τι δρᾷ, ἔχοντες, οὐδὲ ἀζημίους μέν, λυπηρὰς δὲ τῇ ὄψει ἀχθηδόναςπροστιθέμενοι. Ἀνεπαχθῶς δὲ τὰ ἴδια προσομιλοῦντες τὰ δημόσια διὰδέος μάλιστα οὐ παρανομοῦμεν, τῶν τε αἰεὶ ἐν ἀρχῇ ὄντων ἀκροάσει καὶτῶν νόμων, καὶ μάλιστα αὐτῶν ὅσοι τε ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ τῶν ἀδικουμένωνκεῖνται καὶ ὅσοι ἄγραφοι ὄντες αἰσχύνην ὁμολογουμένην φέρουσιν.’Καὶ μὴν καὶ τῶν πόνων πλείστας ἀναπαύλας τῇ γνώμῃ ἐπορισάμεθα, ἀγῶσι μέν γε καὶ θυσίαις διετησίοις νομίζοντες, ἰδίαις δὲ κατασκευαῖς εὐπρεπέσιν, ὧν καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἡ τέρψις τὸ λυπηρὸν ἐκπλήσσει. Ἐπεσέρχεται δὲ διὰ μέγεθος τῆς πόλεως ἐκ πάσης γῆς τὰ πάντα, καὶ ξυμβαίνει ἡμῖν μηδὲν οἰκειοτέρᾳ τῇ ἀπολαύσει τὰ αὐτοῦ ἀγαθὰγιγνόμενα καρποῦσθαι ἢ καὶ τὰ τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων.

“Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and all are alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not direct sour looks at him, which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment. And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; our homes are beautiful and elegant; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish sorrow. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own.”