#freedom

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is. ↗

— Rose Wilder Lane

#ethics #freedom #individual-rights #ownership #philosophy

If one chooses sides on emotion then the rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honour, freedom, independance, truth, the right.......all the subjective illusions. All the eternal trigger words. We are minions of the villan of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance. ↗

— Glen Cook

#freedom

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist? ↗

— Umberto Eco

#chaos #creation #divine-will #omnipotence #theology

Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind ... when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal. ↗

— Friedrick Engels

#democracy #engelism #free-thinker #free-thought #freedom

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #morality #freedom

It is hard for the old slaveholding spirit to die. But die it must.... ↗

— Sujourner Truth

#slavery #freedom

The severest trial of oppression is the constant outrage which one suffers at the thought of the oppressor. What Jesus discovered was how to avoid the inner devastations. His technique was to practice the opposite emotion... [a man] may not get his freedom or possessions back, but he's less miserable. It's a difficult lesson. ↗

— B.F. Skinner

#oppression #freedom

What we have is two important values in conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can't have both. ↗

— Dick Gephardt

#campaigns #conflict #democracy #desire #freedom

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself. ↗

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#assumed #constitutional #curb #decline #efforts

Monoculture wants you to forget that the joy of life is in the community of the village, where you can touch, taste, smell, feel and experience a motley potpourri of cultural vicissitudes. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#monoculture #thoughts-on-life #experience