FREEDOM

"Freedom is not a philosophy, nor is it even an idea. It is a movement of consciousness that leads us, at certain moments, to utter one of two monosyllables: Yes or No. In their brevity, lasting but an instant, like a flash of lightning, the contradictory character of human nature stands revealed."

Octavio Paz

The Other Voice

 

"Freedom is not an idol, or an end, but a prerequisite condition of human worth. Man needs a margin to move about in and try himself out and show what he is worth and attract grace."

-Charles Peguy

 

"Freedom is no heritage. Preservation of freedom is a fresh challenge and a fresh conquest for each generation. It is based on the religious concept of the dignity of man. The discovery that man is free is the greatest discovery of the ages."

-C. Donald Dallas

 

"Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave."

-Euripides

 

"even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer."

-George Orwell

 

"For if men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of mankind....reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter."

-George Washington

 

"Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few."

-Doris Lessing  The Golden Notebook

 

"I ask Vitalie about democracy, reflexively gesturing towards my Sprite, as if a carbonated artificially flavored lemon-lime beverage somehow symbolized man's eternal quest for freedom. Moldovan democracy may be far from perfect but certainly it is better than the totalitarian regime under the Soviets. Isn't that a source of happiness?

   No, says Vitalie, without the slightest hesitation. "In Soviet times, nobody thought about freedom. Communism was all they knew. They didn't wake up every and and say, "Gee, I wish I had more freedom.' Freedom to do what? At least back then people had jobs and a place to live. That was a kind of freedom, and they don't have that now."

Eric Weiner

The Geography of Bliss

 

To the Editor  New York Times   June 12, 2008

  Don't fall into the trap that we in Canada have fallen into: that only free speech that doesn't offend can be considered free speech. This only a euphemism for censorship.

   For those of us in Canada, it too late. Once censorship has been given the cloak of official acceptability, it's almost impossible to root out, because the advocacy groups that support it, and that now have the backing of the law, will do everything they can to hold on to their newfound powers.

   We have opened a door that we can no longer shut. The United States still has a chance to save itself. Don't throw it away.

Roy Weston

Barnaby, BC  Canada

 

"Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it."

-Pericles

 

"No man is free who cannot command himself."

-Pythagoras

 

"Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man is by necessity uncertain."

-Erich Fromm

 

"An education for freedom (and for the love and intelligence which are at once the conditions and result of freedom) must be, among other things, an education in the proper use of language."

-Aldous Huxley

Brave New World Revisited

 

"There is no freedom either in civil or ecclesiastical (affairs), but where the liberty of the press is maintained."

-Matthew Tindal

 

"Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know.....Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors."

-Benjamin Franklin

 

"The church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of....liberty of thought and expression. It has been the sworn enemy of investigation and intellectual development."

-Robert Ingersoll

 

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is Tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives."

-Robert Heinlein

 

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

-Noam Chomsky

 

"Without free speech no search for truth is possible: without free speech progress is checked and the nations no longer march forward toward the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial stays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."

-Charles Bradlaugh

 

"Without Freedom of Thought, there can no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as Publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech...."

-Ben Franklin   1772

 

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be nor more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power; would be justified in silencing mankind."

-John Stuart Mill

 

 

"It seems an odd way to structure a free society: most people have little or no authority over what they do five days a week for forty-five years. Doesn't sound much like "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Sounds like a nation of drones."

-Michael Ventura

 

"If freedom had been the happy, simple, relaxed state of ordinary humanity, man would have everywhere been free-whereas through most of time and space he has been in chains. Do not let us make any mistake about this. The natural government of man is servitude. tyranny is the normal pattern of government."

-Adlai E. Stevenson

 

"We now relinquish our freedoms in the cause of war, of "defending our freedoms."

Joseph Eger

 

"Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom."

W.H.. Auden

 

"To be freed from the belief that there is no freedom

is indeed to be free."

-Martin Buber

 

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."

Albert Einstein

 

"We gain our freedom when we attain our truest nature. The man who is an artist finds his artistic freedom when he finds his ideals of art. Then is he freed from laborious attempts at imitation, from the goading of popular approbation."

Rabindranath Tagore

 

"Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close

to freedom. "

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

 

"….I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale; it is much stupidity….I need not say that, in real sound stupidity, the English are unrivaled….In fact, what we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature’s favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion."

Walter Bagehot

"Letters on the French Coup d’ Etat,III in Literary Studies

 

 

"The cost of a free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure those purposes which satisfy enlightened reason."

Alfred North Whitehead

 

"Man's freedom is never in being saved troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element of joy."

-Ranbindranath Tagore

 

"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

William Pitt

 

"A Christian man is the most free lord of all and subject to none."

Martin Luther

 

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

James Madison

 

"If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you’re free-however free one can be on this planet."

Theodore White

 

"What I care about most is the freedom of man, the liberation of the individual man from the network of moral and social convention in which he believes, or rather in which he thinks he believes, and smaller, sometimes even worse than he really is."

Fedrico Fellini

 

"Freedom of mind requires not only , or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."

Allan Bloom

 

"It is by the goodness of God that we have in our country three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."

Mark Twain

 

"All eyes are opened or opening to  the rights of man….the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

Thomas Jefferson 1826

 

"The opinion’s of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction…."

Thomas Jefferson

 

"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."

Alexis De Tocqueville

 

"The beginning and end of all philosophy is Freedom."

Schilling 1745

 

"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."

-Milton Friedman

 

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."

-Douglas MacArthur

 

"The monster fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted."

-Voltaire

 

"For we are free, if we are ready to pay the price of freedom, which will always be personal sacrifice. A free man is a courageous man, not a man who obtained (from whom?) three or four or a hundred and one freedoms. You hear "X is a free spirit." From whom has he his freedom? Not from the State, nor revolution, not from the Soviets, nor from democracy, and certainly not from experts. It springs from his vision alone, and from his struggle to realize his vision. Lenin under Czarism was more free than a member of the Communist Party under Stalin. And George Washington was freer than the American citizen who flicks the dial of his radio. They were fighting and we? We shall not be free, even in peace, unless we continue the fight."

Denis de Rougemont

The Last Trump

 

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men (and women) of zeal-well meaning but without understanding."

Justice Louis Brandies

 

To The Editor,

   Don't fall into the trap that we in Canada have fallen into: that only free speech that doesn't offend can be considered free speech. This is only a euphemism for censorship.

   For those of us in Canada, it is too late. Once censorship has been given the cloak of official acceptability, it's almost impossible to root out, because the advocacy groups that support it, and that now have the backing of the law, will do everything they can to hold on to their newfound powers.

   We have opened a door that we can no longer shut. The United States still has a chance to save itself. Don't throw it away."

Roy Weston Burnaby, British Columbia June 12, 2008  New York Times

 

 

"Far from being in any way scientific, psychological-conditioning programs are often fundamentally anti-intellectual. They enshrine "feelings," not analysis; the opinions of inexperienced peers, not facts: they induce psychological acceptance of fashionable attitudes rather than teach logical procedures for analyzing assertions, or cannons of evidence for scrutinizing claims. In addition to displacing intellectual courses from the curriculum, brainwashing, programs actively promote anti-intellectual ways of dealing with the realities of life."

Thomas Sowell

Inside American Education

 

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of religion

Freedom from want

Freedom from fear

(announced by Franklin D. Roosevelt 1942 State of the Union Speech)

"….There are not four freedoms. There is only freedom, or none. I shall prove it by a parable.

I know of some men who in fact do enjoy the above-mentioned four freedoms. They can say anything they want to their neighbors. 2. They freely enjoy the comforts of their chosen religion. 3. They don’t have to worry about their subsistence. 4. They are effectively protected against any dangers from the outside. They are the American Prison inmates."

Denis de Rougemont

The Last Trump

 

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst."

Albert Camus

 

"Freedom is a great word. Under the banner of industrial freedom the most predatory wars have been waged, and under the banner of freedom to work, the workers have been plundered."

V.I. Lenin

 

"Freedom of thought is the greatest triumph over tyranny that brave men have ever won....we owe to their (Quaker) heroic devotion the most priceless of our treasures, our perfect liberty of thought and speech, and all who lover our country's freedom may well reverence the memory of those martyred Quakers by whose death and agony the battle of New England has been won."

Brook Adams

 

"The denizen of the technological state of the future will have everything his heart ever desired, except, of course, his freedom."

John Wilkinson

 

"At the end of a murderous century, let’s curse the enemies of the individual. If, in order to do so, we must fall back on the vocabulary of abuse, so be it.

This is what I learned from twentieth-century history: only dumb ideas get recycled. Every social reformer longs to be the brains of an enlightened, soul-reforming penitentiary. Everyone who is vain, dull, peevish, and sexually frustrated dreams of legislating his impotence. The image of a billion people dressed in Mao’s uniforms and shouting from his little red book continues to be the secret hope of new visionaries."

Charles Simic

Orphan Factory

 

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."

Salamon Rushdie

 

"The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us-is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority….

The majority has might –unfortunately-but right it is not. Right-are I and a few others. The minority is always right…..

I have a mind to make a revolution against the lie that the majority is in the possession of truth. What kind of truths are those around which the majority usually gathers? They are truths that have become so old that they are on the way toward becoming shakey. But once a truth has become that old, it is also on the way toward becoming a lie…..A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen years; at most twenty, Nevertheless it is only at that stage that the majority makes their acquaintance….All these majority truths….are rather like rancid, spoiled…hams. And that is the source of the moral scurvy that rages all around us….."

Ibsen

An Enemy of the People

 

"Freedom! To fill people’s mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information of people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right to peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passerby with advertisements. Freedom! For publishers and film producers to poison the younger generation with corrupting filth. Freedom! For adolescents of fourteen to eighteen to immerse themselves in idleness and pleasure instead of intensive study and spiritual growth…..Freedom! To divulge the secrets of one’s country for personal political gain."

Solzhenitsyn

 

 

"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are entrenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"The free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought."

Leon Blum

 

"Ordinary people! Merely think how they shall spend their time; a man of talent tries to use it."

Arthur Schopenhauer

 

"It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move in one’s inward journey into new realms, that to stand defiantly for outer freedom."

Rollo May

 

"Freedom lies in being bold."

Robert Frost

 

"Freedom, especially a woman’s freedom, is a conquest to be made, not a gift to be received. It isn’t granted. It must be taken."

Federico Fellini

 

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."

Eric Hoffer

 

 

"What does liberation mean? If I free someone in the desert and he cannot go anywhere, what is his freedom worth?"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

"Compulsion is being trapped in a known psychic reality, a dead-end space. Freedom is in the unknown. If you believe there is an unknown everywhere, in your own body, in your relationships with other people, in political institutions, in the universe, then you have maximum freedom. If you can examine old beliefs and realize they are limits to be overcome and can also realize you don’t have to have a belief about something you don’t yet know anything about, your are free."

John C. Lilly

 

 

"…..The State

Loathes freedom like the very plague,

But loves equality all too well.

Henrik Ibsen

 

"The buzzard must be a buzzard and the bee must be a bee-this is

fate, but man is free to choose which he will imitate.

W.J. Bryant

 

"When true freedom covers the earth, we shall see the end of tyranny-politically, religiously and economically. I am not here referring to modern democracy as a condition which meets the needs, for democracy is at present a philosophy of wishful thinking, and an unachieved ideal I refer to that period which will surely come, in which an enlightened people will rule; these people will not tolerate authoritarianism in any political system; they will not accept or permit the rule of any body of men who undertake to tell them what they must believe in order to be saved, or what government they must accept. When the people are told the truth, and when they can freely judge and decide for themselves, we shall then see a much better world."

Alice Bailey

Ponder This

 

"And what about all these much-vaunted advocates of freedom? Is the work of liberation only to be allowed in the field of politics? ….Is it not above all the spirit that needs liberation? Serfs’ souls like ours cannot even enjoy the freedoms we already have.

Henrik Ibsen

 

"You don't need to choose freedom-you are free. This freedom, it's a sorry thing under the stars."

-Nazim Hikmet

 

"I'm beginning to see that I am only going to be free when I'm fully involved in the world. A strange insight for me."

Ram Das/Richard Alpert

 

 

"In our time, as in times before, creep on the insidious forces that, producing inequality, destroy Liberty. On the horizon the clouds begin to lower. Liberty calls to us again. We must follow her further; we must trust her fully. Either we must wholly accept her or she will not stay. It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life; they must stand on equal terms with reference to the bounty of nature. Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light! Either this, or darkness comes on, and the very forces that progress has evolved turn to powers that work destruction. This is the universal law. This is the lesson of the centuries. Unless its foundations be laid in justice the social structure cannot stand.

Henry George

 

 

"True freedom is then inseparable from the inner strength which can assume the common burden of evil which weighs both on one- self and one's adversary. False freedom is only a manifestation of the weakness that cannot bear even one's own evil until it is projected onto the other and seen as exclusively his. The highest form of spiritual freedom is, as Gandhi believed, to be sought in the strength of heart which is capable of liberating the oppressed and the oppressor together. "

Thomas Merton

 

 

"We have all-rulers and ruled-been living so long in a stifling, un-natural atmosphere that we might well feel in the beginning that we have lost the lungs for breathing the invigorating ozone of freedom. "

Gandhi

 

"No government on earth can make men who have realized freedom in their hearts salute against their will. :

Gandhi

 

 

"If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up. "

E.B. White

 

 

"I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long-standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose. "

E.B. White (July 1940)

 

 

"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. "

II Corinthians 2:17

 

 

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. "

G.B. Shaw

 

 

"There can be no real freedom or democracy until the men who do the work in a business also control its management."

Bertrand Russell

 

 

"Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail

the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder

That the clanging of the church bells blew far into the breeze

Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder

Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind'

Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind

An' the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time

An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing."

 

Bob Dylan

Chimes of Freedom

c M. Witmark & Sons 1964

 

 

"Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject  to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity."

Gandhi

 

 

"To the Greeks freedom was then understood to consist of status, personal inviolability, freedom of economic activity, right of unrestricted movement," and slavery consequently was the lack of these four attributes."

Hannah Arendt

 

 

A man obsessed is no longer free." No man who is divided can be free, and a man who cannot make the free act of choosing the object of his love is condemned to this division. "

Berdyaev

 

 

"Personal liberty-that is to say, the liberty to move about- is everywhere conceded, while of political and legal inequality there are in the United States no vestiges, and in the most backward civilized countries but few. But the great cause of inequality remains, and is manifesting itself in the unequal distribution of wealth. The essence of slavery is that it takes from the laborer all he produces save enough to support an animal existence, and to this minimum the wages of free labor, under existing conditions, unmistakably tend. Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent steadily tends to swallow up the gain, and more than the gain. Thus the condition of the masses in every civilized country is, or is tending to become, that of virtual slavery under the forms of freedom. And it is probably that of all kinds of slavery this is the most cruel and relentless. For the laborer is robbed of the produce of his labor and compelled to toil for a mere subsistence; but his taskmasters, instead of human beings, assume the form of imperious necessities. Those to whom his labor is rendered and from whom his wages are received are often driven in their own turn-contact between the laborers and the ultimate beneficiaries of their labor is sundered, and individuality is lost. The direct responsibility of master to slave, a responsibility which exercises a softening influence upon the great majority of men, does not arise; it is not one human being who seems to drive another to unremitting and ill-requited toil, but the "the inevitable laws of supply and demand," for which no one is in particular is responsible The maxims of Cato the Censor-maxims which were regarded with abhorrence even in an age of cruelty and universal slaveholding- that after as much work as possible is obtained from a slave he should be turned out to die, become the common rule; and even the selfish interest which prompts the master to look after the comfort and well-being of the slave is lost. Labor has become a commodity, and the laborers a machine. There are no masters and slaves, no owners and owned, but only buyers and sellers. The haggling of the market takes the place of every other sentiment. "

Henry George

Progress & Poverty 1888

 

"The libertarian creed....offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Even more than conservatives, who are often attached to the monarchical tradition of a happily obsolete European past, libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, a free-market economy. Libertarians are the only genuine current heirs of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and the abolitionists.

   Strands and remnants of libertarian doctrines are, indeed , all around us, in large parts of our glorious past and in values and ideas in the confused present. But only libertarianism takes these strands and remnants and integrates them into a mighty, logical, and consistent system. The enormous success of Karl Marx and Marxism has been due not to the validity of his ideas-all of which, indeed, are fallacious-but to the fact that he dared to weave socialist theory into a mighty system. Liberty cannot succeed without an equivalent and contrasting systematic theory; and until the last few years, despite our great heritage of economic and political thought and practice, we have not had a fully integrated and consistent theory of liberty. We now have that systematic theory; we come, fully armed with our knowledge, prepared to bring our message and to capture the imagination of all groups and strands in the population. All other theories and systems have clearly failed: socialism is in retreat everywhere, and notably in Eastern Europe; liberalism has bogged us down in a host of insoluble problems; conservatism has nothing to offer but sterile defense of the status quo. Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind."

Murray N. Rothbard

For a New Liberty

 

"Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we recognize private property in land. Until that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in vain."

Henry George 1879

 

 

"A person dependent on somebody else for everything from potatoes to opinions may declare that he is a free man, and his government may issue a certificate granting him his freedom, but he will not be free. He is that variety of specialist known as a consumer, which means that he is the abject dependent of producers. How can he be free who can do nothing for himself? What is the First Amendment to him whose mouth is stuck to the tit of the "affluent society"? Men are free precisely to the extent that they are equal to their own needs. The most able are the most free."

Wendell Berry

 

 

"What impels man to a moral action is his experience of the world of spirit through the revelation of that world within his soul. This experience takes place within the personal individuality of man. To experience oneself in reciprocal intercourse with the spiritual world through a moral action is to experience FREEDOM  For the spiritual content does not act within the soul of necessity, but in such a way that man himself must develop the activity which impels him to receive the spiritual."

Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography

 

 

"The world is full of wickedness and misery precisely because it is based on freedom-yet that freedom constitutes the whole dignity of man and of his world . " .

Berdyaev

Dostoevsky

 

 

"Dostoevsky wanted to take men along the ways of wildest self- will and revolt in order to show them that they lead to the extinction of liberty and to self-annihilation. This road of liberty can only end either in the deification of man or in the discovery of God. "

Berdyaev

 

 

"The thing which Dostoevsky and Nietzche knew is that man is terribly free, that liberty is a tragic and a grievous burden to him."

Berdyaev

 

"Scope for free choice, personal caprice, however extravagant, the maddest of fancies-those are what man is after, quintessential objects that you can't classify and in exchange for which all systems and theories can go to hell."

Berdyaev "

 

 

"When you define liberty you limit it, and when you limit it

you destroy it."

Brad Whitlock

 

"Strange to say, under the influence of laboratory science many people today seem to use their freedom only for the purpose of denying its existence. Men and women of great gifts find their purest delight in magnifying every "mechanism", every "inevitability", everything where human freedom does not enter or does not appear to enter. A great shout of triumph goes up whenever anybody has found some further evidence-in physiology or psychology or sociology or economics or politics of unfreedom, some further indication that people cannot help being what they are and doing what they are doing, no matter how inhuman their actions might be. The denial of freedom, of course, is a denial of responsibility: there are no acts, but only events; everything simply happens; no one is responsible. "

E.F. Schumacher

 

 

"Man has received freedom from God, not from himself, and this freedom is exclusively under the power of God, totally determined by Him-that is, it is ultimately a fiction. God invites the creature to love God and begin a divine life, but God expects an answer only from Himself, for its He who gives freedom and knows the consequences of freedom. The problem of Ivan Karamazov is worked out more fully and transposed into eternity."

Nicolas Berdyaev

 

"Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have We given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world's center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer."

-Pico della Mirandola

Oration

 

"What is Liberty? You say of a locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that Friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with a light foot, "How free she runs," when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is "in Irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy. Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies. "

Woodrow Wilson

 

 

"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism....which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote....Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may rouse the imagination of large numbers, but a mere "reasonable freedom of trade" or a mere" relaxation of controls" is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm. The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and thereby an influence on public opinion....Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost."

Friedrich Hayek

 

  "Just as the first responsibility of freedom is to ensure the amplest possible forum for communication and dialogue, the first impulse of tyranny is to diminish that forum to a narrow, monodirectional channel of dogma. Until the 1990s in eastern Europe, this strangling of ideas was achieved through arbitrary regulation of the media, interdiction of messages from abroad, severe limitations on publishing, restrictions of personal travel and stringent control of educational methods and materials. Because even repression so comprehensive as this could not fully stop the flow of ideas, governments took the further step of creating secret police who used informants to monitor the speech of their fellow citizens and who also made sure that nationals could not speak freely abroad. Only when these regimes had bottled up all outlets of human expressions could they be confident of their power.

  What is life like under such circumstances? The bitterest diatribes of Western anti-Communists are probably inadequate to describe it. Westerners can condemn oppression and sympathize with its victims, but they must struggle to imagine the complex of shame, depression, frustration, bitterness, boredom and dread that result from what might be called the political realization of a paranoid fantasy. To enter the mind of an intellectual in eastern Europe, they must conjure up a haunting sense of unfulfilled promise, a consciousness of being unspecifiably diminished, an anguished feeling that their instinctive desire to learn, to know and to express is somehow wrong and can be indulged only at the risk of guilt and punishment. Yet those who feel this pain may be called the lucky minority; for the majority, the political repression of free thought breeds simply dullness, a spiritual anesthesia coherent with the deadened society at large. Deprived of both individuality and community, people lose aspiration. Their world shrinks to the material effects around them. Tyranny's deepest offense is the reduction of its citizens from people of potential dignity to creatures of barbaric despair."

Robert Grudin

On Dialogue

 

"What does freedom cost?"

"Freedom will cost you the mask, you have on," she said. "the mask that feels so comfortable and is so hard to shed off, not because it fits so well but because you have been wearing it for so long." She stopped pacing about the room and came to stand in front of the card  table..

   "Do you know what freedom is?" she asked rhetorically "Freedom is the total absence of concern about yourself, " , she said, sitting beside me on the bed. "And the best way to quit being concerned with yourself is to be concerned about others."

-Florinda Donner

 

 

NOTEBOOK: Regime Change by Lewis H. Lapham Harper's Mag Feb 2003

"Unrelenting in its search for Osama bin Laden and the roots of all the world's evil, the Defense Department some months ago established an Information Awareness Office that took for its letterhead emblem the all-seeing eye of God. Although still in the early stages of development and for the moment funded with an annual budget of only $200 million, the new medium of mass investigation seeks to "detect and classify" every prospective terrorist (foreign, hybrid, mutant, or native born) setting foot on American soil. No door or envelope unopened, no secret unexposed, no suspicious suitcase or Guatemalan allowed to descend unnoticed from a cruise ship or a bicycle.

   To give weight and form to a paranoid dream of reason not unlike the one that sustained the sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisition, the government apparently means to recruit a synod of high-speed computers capable of sifting through "ultra-large" data warehouses stocked with every electronic proof of human movement in the wilderness of cyberspace-bank, medical, and divorce records, credit-card transactions, emails ( interoffice and extraterritorial), college transcripts, surveillance photographs (from cameras in hospitals and shopping malls as well as from those in airports and hotel bars), driver's licenses and passport applications, bookstore purchases, website visits, and traffic violations. Connect all the names and places to all the dates and times, and once the systems become full operational, in four years or maybe ten, the protectors of the public health and safety hope to reach beyond "truth maintenance" and "biologically inspired algorithms for agent control" to the construction of "FutureMap"-i.e., a set of indices programmed into the fiber optic equivalent of a crystal ball that modifies "market-based techniques for avoiding surprise" in such a way that next week's nuclear explosion can be seen as clearly as last week's pornographic movie. In the meantime, while waiting for the technical up-grades with which to perform "entity extraction from natural language text," the clerks seated at the computer screens can look for inspiration to the mandala on their office stationary-an obverse of the Great Seal of the United States similar to the ornament on the back of the $1 bill, an Egyptian pyramid and mystic, Rosicrucian light buttressed by the rendering in Latin of the motto "Knowledge is power."

Lewis H. Lapham

See article in Harper's Feb 2003

 

"There is supposedly so much more freedom in our world than in theirs. But perhaps even fewer lives are truly free. The time between birth and death is all too fleeting, and life is a train that picks up speed. To waste it is sinful.

   It was in the freedom and courage to choose one's own life that Orwell and Waugh were most nearly the same. That their lives were deliberately chosen is the most valuable legacy that both offer to us now, in our own so-busy time.":

-David Lebedoff

The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh: In Love and War

 

"The real social revolution of the last 30 years , one we are still living through, is the switch from a life that is largely organized for us to a world in which we are all forced to be in charge of our own destiny."

-Charles Handy

 

"you've heard it said that we must protect our freedom lest it be lost.

   The reverse is even truer. Why not let our freedoms protect us, lest we be lost?

   For freedom isn't delicate-It's a tough, old bird. Freedom has always been, and is today, the source of America's strength

    Our freedom to think, to choose, to act has not only enriched the American character-it has given us a material standard of living that is the envy of the world.

   we are able to take for granted television and autos, food and clothing in abundance, precisely because freedom emancipates the mind and hand. Freedom is constructive-while tyranny confines man and finally destroys him.

   That is why, in time to come, the best protection of our freedom will be more freedom.

   It will enable America to resist tyranny without resorting to it....to form a great military force without being militarized....to save a world without enslaving it.

   In this climate of freedom, Burlington Mills will continue to do what it could do nowhere else on earth; fulfill the responsibility of its freedom by creating better fabrics, at better prices, for more people."

-Burlington Mills

 

   "At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything? In the United States-and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now-recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom had accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world's ost powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. "Free as a bird," we say and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone-or at least by bread and circuses alone. "In the end" says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's parable, "in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us 'make us your slaves, but feed us.' "And when Alyosha Karamazov asks his brother, the teller of the story, if the Grand Inquisitor is speaking ironically, Ivan answers, "Not a bit of it! He claims it as a merit for himself and his church that they have vanquished freedom and done so to make men happy" Yes, to make men happy; "for nothing," the Inquisitor insists, "has ever been more insupportable for a man or a human society than freedom." Nothing, except the absence of freedom; for when things go badly, and the rations are reduced, the grounded dodos will clamor again for their wings-only to renounce them, yet once more, when times grow better and the dodo=farmers become more lenient and generous. The young people who now think so poorly of democracy may grow up to become fighters for freedom. The cry of "Give me television and hamburgers, but don't bother me with the responsibilities of liberty," may give place, under altered circumstances, to the cry of "Give me liberty or give me death." If such a revolution takes place, it will be due in part to the operation of forces over which even the most powerful rulers have very little control, in part to the incompetence of those rulers, their inability to make effective use of the mind-manipulating instruments with which science and technology have supplied, and will go on supplying, they would be tyrant. Considering how little they knew and how poorly they were equipped, the Grand Inquisitor reproaches Christ with having called upon men to be free and tells Him that "we have corrected Thy work and founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority." but miracle, mystery and authority are not enough to guarantee the indefinite survival of a dictatorship. In my able of Brave New World, the dictators had added science to the list and thus were able to enforce their authority by manipulating the bodies of embryos, the reflexes of infants and the minds of children and adults. and, instead of merely talking about miracles and hinting symbolically at mysteries; they were able, by means of drugs, to give their subjects the direct experience of mysteries and miracles-to transform mere faith into ecstatic knowledge. The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. In the past free-thinkers and revolutionaries were often the products of the most piously orthodox education. This is not surmising. the methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work-with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. there seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be over-thrown.

   Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. many young people, it is rue, do not seem to value freedom. but some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. it is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them."

-Aldous Huxley

Brave New World Revisited  (1958)

 

"If  in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again."

-F.A. Hayek The Road to Serfdom

**************************

        Book: Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You" by Aryeh Neier "Anyone of us could find a place in these pages."

                                   Senator Sam J. Ervin

Book: "Snitch Culture…How citizens are turned into the eyes and ears of the state." By Jim Redden

Book: "Liberty And Freedom: An American History" by David Hackett Fischer

Book: "The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech" by Tammy Bruce

Book: "What's God Got To Do With It? Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk, and the Separation of Church and State" Ed. by Tim Page

Book: "The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge" by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

Book: "On Dialogue: an essay in free thought" by Robert Grudin

Book: "The Wish to Be Free: Society, Psyche and Value Change" by Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt

Book: "Casualty Of War: The Bush Administration's Assault on a Free Press" by David Dadge

Book: "The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age" by Jeffrey Rosen

Book: "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror" by Christian Parenti

Book: "Lost Liberties: Ashcroft and the Assault on Personal Freedom" ed by Cynthia Brown

Book: "The War on the Bill of Rights: And the Gathering Resistance" by Nat Hentoff

Book: "Liberty and Freedom" by David Hackett Fischer

Book: "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism" by David Cole

Book: "The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism" Ed by Richard C. Leone

Book: "Terrorism, Freedom, and Security: Winning Without War" by Phillip B. Heymann

Book: "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad" by Fareed Zakaria

Book: "Liberty & Freedom" by David Hackett Fischer

Book: "Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen" by James Bovard

Book: "Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press" by Kristina Borjesson

Book: "FREEDOM: A History of US" by Joy Hakim

 

www.Freedomhouse.org

 

 

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