#reed

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free. ↗

— Walter Cronkite

#either #free #little #such #thing

There are members of our body politic who tell us that the public interest is best served when government action is reduced to a minimum and especially when it is kept negative in character. But just now, the nation as a whole seems to be moving rather swiftly and decisively—as is the world as a whole—in the opposite direction. More and more, we Americans are initiating new forms of positive government action for the common good. Between these two tendencies the struggle becomes every day more open and more intense. And as we wage that conflict it is well to remember that the logic of the Constitution gives no backing to either of the two combatants, as against the other. We are left free, as any self-governing people must leave itself free, to determine by specific decisions what our economy shall be. It would be ludicrous to say that we are committed by the Constitution to the economic cooperations of socialism. But equally ludicrous are those appeals by which, in current debate, we are called upon to defend the practices of capitalism, of "free enterprise," so-called, as essential to the freedom of the American Way of Life. The American Way of Life is free because it is what we Americans freely choose—from time to time—that it shall be. ↗

— Alexander Meiklejohn

#capitalism #freedom #government #politics #socialism

I made my own assessment of my life, and I began to live it. That was freedom. ↗

— Fernando Flores

#began #freedom #i #life #live

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#admit #amidst #away #cannot #censorship

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else. ↗

— Katherine Mansfield

#faith #freedom #humility #risk #surrender

The Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy. ↗

— Tommy Franks

#cherishes #couple #democracy #experiment #free

They have the ability to take a person's freedom from them. On certain situations, they have the ability to take a person's reputation. And under certain circumstances, they have the authority to take a person's life. ↗

— Daryl Gates

#authority #certain #circumstances #freedom #freedom from

What I loathe is the multi-national conglomerates who must take responsibility for the degradation and pollution of so much of our landscape with their factory farming and greed. ↗

— Fay Godwin

#factory #farming #greed #i #landscape

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed. ↗

— Arthur Helps

#book #creed #his #man #only

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#any #belong #black #dyed #freedom