#lit

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

— Noël Coward

#buildings #cities #london #morality #skyscrapers

With each passing day, I become more and more convinced that the greatest threat to American freedom is the United States government. ↗

— Michel Templet

#politics #united-states #freedom

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

Genuine bravery for a writer.... It is about calmly speaking the truth when everyone else is silenced, when the truth cannot be expressed. It is about speaking out with a different voice, risking the wrath of the state and offending everyone, for the sake of the truth, and the writer’s conscience. ↗

— Murong Xuecun

#literature #freedom

[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

A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#democracy #freedom-of-speech #power #privacy #responsibilities

We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves. ↗

— Karl Popper

#freedom

...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#pride #freedom

To free a man from error is not to deprive him of anything but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbours it. Therefore deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#responsibility #social-debt #faith

Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticise only what is permissable to criticise. ↗

— Murong Xuecun

#literature #freedom