#ali

I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree. ↗

— Karl Popper

#freedom #socialism #beauty

America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. ↗

— John Quincy Adams

#imperialism #independence #isolationism #liberty #noninterventionism

I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals. ↗

— Noël Coward

#buildings #cities #london #morality #skyscrapers

To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#mankind #equality

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. ↗

— David Graeber

#economics #libertarianism #markets #politics #freedom

I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom. ↗

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#freedom

Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly. ↗

— Robert Bringhurst

#freedom #freedom

I am not a number; I am a free man. ↗

— Patrick McGoohan

#freedom #individuality #nonconformity #the-prisoner #freedom

To be a member of such a crowd ... is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim. ↗

— Remy de Gourmont

#democracy #freedom #individuality #mob #freedom

He probably wanted real power, the power to direct one's environment towards a harmonious end, and not fictitious power, the power to order and be obeyed; and he must have known that he had not been able to exercise real power over Rome. It would have been easier for him if what we were told when we were young was true, and that the decay of Rome was due to immorality. Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human beings rarely so potent. There is so little difference between the extent to which any large number of people indulge in sexual intercourse, when they indulge in it without inhibitions and when they indulge in it with inhibitions, that it cannot often be a determining factor in history. The exceptional person may be an ascetic or a debauchee, but the average man finds celibacy and sexual excess equally difficult. All we know of Roman immorality teaches us that absolute power is a poison, and that the Romans, being fundamentally an inartistic people, had a taste for pornography which they often gratified in the description of individuals and families on which that poison had worked. ↗

— Rebecca West

#rome #equality