God is for men and religion is for women.
~ Joseph Conrad, in Nostromo
The world is not composed of religious and non-religious people. It is composed rather of religious people who have different ultimate concerns, different gods, and who respond to the living God in different ways…. All humans are incurably religious; we simply manifest different religious allegiances.
~ Ronald Nash, in The Closing of the American Heart: What’s Really Wrong With America’s Schools
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The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three-headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three-headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
~ in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than no to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
~ in a letter to Abigail Adams, 1787)
I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
~ in a letter to James Madison after Shay’s rebellion
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is their natural manure.
~ in a letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
~ in a letter to Rutledge, 1795
I have said and always will say, that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.
~ Quoted by A.W. Pink in What Follows from Divine Inspiration
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others.
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever. (in reference to slavery)
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.
I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. ( in a letter to Rutledge, 1795)
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
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Abraham Lincoln’s Love Of Reading
The Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards
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That we do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
~ in Collected Essays
Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything.
~ in Brave New World Revisited
Chastity–the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza
Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ in Music at Night
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
~ in Proper Studies
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
~ in Texts and Pretexts
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
~ in Vedanta for the Western World
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
The proper study of mankind is books.
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eying the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
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Bibliography
The Burning Wheel (1916)
Jonah (1917)
The Defeat of Youth (1918)
Leda (1920)
Limbo (1920)
Crome Yellow (1921)
Mortal Coils (1922)
Antic Hay (1923)
On the Margin (1923)
Little Mexican / Young Archimedes (1924)
Those Barren Leaves (1925)
Along The Road (1925)
Essays New and Old (1926)
Two or Three Graces (1926)
Proper Studies (1927)
Jesting Pilate (1926)
Point Counter Point (1928)
Do What You Will (1929)
Arabia Infelix (1929)
Brief Candles (1930)
Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
The Cicadas (1931)
Music at Night (1931)
Brave New World (1932)
Texts and Pretexts (1932)
Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936)
The Olive Tree (1936)
Ends and Means (1937)
Jacob’s Hands; A Fable
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939)
Words and their Meanings (1940)
Grey Eminence (1941)
The Art of Seeing (1942)
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
Ape and Essence (1948)
Themes and Variations (1950)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
The Devils of Loudun (1953)
The Doors of Perception (1954)
The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Heaven and Hell (1956)
Adonis and the Alphabet (1956)
Collected Short Stories (1957)
Collected Essays
(1958)
Brave New World Revisited
Island (1962)
Literature and Science (1963)
The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)
The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)
Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)
First Philosopher’s Song
Mortal Coils – A Play
The World of Light
The Discovery, Adapted from Francis Sheridan
Selected Letters (2007)
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A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint.
But yet he was reputed one of the wise men, that made answer to the question when a man should marry? A young man not yet, an older man not at all.
Certainly, in taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon.
He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.
It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s mind about to religion.
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
Silence is the virtue of fools.
This is certain, that man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
To seek to extinguish Anger is but a bravery of the Stoics. We have better oracles: Be angry, but sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger.
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Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul.
~ Aristotle
No one indeed believes anything unless he has first thought that it it to be believed.
~ Augustine of Hippo
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith; they keep faith alive and moving.
~ Frederick Buechner
A comprehended God is no God.
~ Dio Chrysostom
If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.
~ Denis Diderot, in A Philosophical Conversation
Reason is our Soules left hand, Faith is her right, …
~ John Donne
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because hey manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions; the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.
~ Steve Eley
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.
~ T.S. Eliot, in his Introduction to Pascal’s Pensees
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
~ Galileo Galilei
Proof is only applicable to very rarefied areas of philosophy and mathematics…. For the most part we are driven to acting on good evidence, without the luxury of proof. There is good evidence of the link between cause and effect. There is good evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow. There is good reason to believe my mother loves me and is not just fattening me up for the moment when she will pop arsenic into my tea. And there is good reason to believe in God. Very good reason. Not conclusive proof, but very good reason just the same…. I believe it is much harder to reject the existence of a supreme being than accept it.
~ Michael Green, in Faith for the Non-religious
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
~ Ralph Hodgson
A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.
~ David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Concerning Human Understanding
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
~ Robert Jastrow, in God and the Astronomer
The more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust Him; the greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more childlike will be our faith.
~ J. Gresham Machen
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth.
~ H. L. Menken
The faith that does not come from reason is to be doubted, and the reason that does not lead to faith is to be feared,
~ G. Campbell Morgan
Faith is reason at rest in God.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon
God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in Wise Thoughts for Every Day
It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is a necessary to reason, as reason is to religion.
~ George Washington
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Books on Faith & Reason
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
~ Albert Einstein, in The World As I See It
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I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
~ Robert Frost
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Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
~ James Baldwin
Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
~ Jeffrey Borenstein
The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.
~ Leonid Brezhnev
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
~ Pearl S. Buck
I preach deliverance to others, I tell them there is freedom, while I hear my own chains clang.
~ John Bunyan
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
~ Edmund Burke
The patriot’s blood is the seed of Freedom’s tree.
~ Thomas Campbell
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
~ Albert Camus
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.
~ Hodding Carter
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.
~ Noam Chomsky
A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you.
~ Ramsey Clark
Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves, howe’er contented, never know.
~ William Cowper
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
~ Clarence Darrow
Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
~ Moshe Dayan
History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.
~ Charles de Gaulle
The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.
~ John Dewey
To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Devils
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves.
~ Frederick Douglass
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
~ Frederick Douglass
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
~ Frederick Douglass, in an 1883 Civil Rights Mass Meeting speech in Washington, D.C.
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
~ William O. Douglas
As far as your self-control goes, as far goes your freedom.
~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
~ Albert Einstein
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Boston” Stanza 15
If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of philosophy.
~ Epictetus
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
~ Epictetus
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
~ William Faulkner
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
~ Marilyn Ferguson
We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.
~ Felix Frankfurter
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
~ Viktor Frankl
Freedom lies in being bold.
~ Robert Frost
You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
~ Robert Frost
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
~ Lillian Hellman
The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
~ Samuel Hendel
We feel free when we escape – even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.
~ Eric Hoffer
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
~ Molly Ivins
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
~ Thomas Jefferson
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
~ Thomas Jefferson
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Freedom is like taking a bath — you have to keep doing it every day!
~ Florynce Kennedy
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
~ John F. Kennedy
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
~ John F. Kennedy
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
~ Søren Kierkegaard
There are two freedoms, the false one where one is free to do what he likes, and the true where a man is free to do what he ought.
~ Charles Kingsley
Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.
~ Russell Kirk, in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 33
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Him that I love, I wish to be free — even from me.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings.
~ Walter Lippmann, in A Preface to Morals
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
~ Rosa Luxemburg
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
~ Thomas Macaulay
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, in a speech to the Virginia Convention in 1788
We are free, truly free, when we don’t need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.
~ Ricardo Flores Magon, in a speech on May 31, 1914
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else.
~ Peyton Conway March
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
~ Somerset Maugham
We have to call it “freedom”: who’d want to die for “a lesser tyranny”?
~ Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook
Freedom means choosing your burden.
~ Hephzibah Menuhin
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right… The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
~ John Stuart Mill
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — and then, the opportunity to choose.
~ C. Wright Mills
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
~ Edward R. Murrow
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.
~ Eleanor Holmes Norton
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
~ Thomas Paine
If a man does only what is required of him, he is a slave.
If a man does more than is required of him, he is a free man.
~ Chinese Proverb
In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
~ George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, “Maxims: Liberty and Equality,”
If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
~ Carl Shurz
How can you call a man free when his pleasures rule over him.
~ Socrates
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~ Adlai Stevenson, from a speech in Detroit, 1952
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
~ Henry David Thoreau
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.
~ Mark Twain
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
~ Voltaire
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
~ Virginia Woolf
To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
~ Virginia Woolf
No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.
~ John P. Zenger
.
Turning the opening pages of A Circle of Quiet
No. Most certainly L’Engle IS a kindred spirit. The differences in our worldviews reflect the different generations we represent, different social class upbringing, different intellectual climates, different spiritual nurture, different religious affiliations and different theological convictions. Those differences are substantial. Had we the opportunity to actually spend time together we would no doubt have had violently glorious intellectual battles — but the battles would have taken place BECAUSE we were kindred spirits.
Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) is best known for her children’s books, especially Newberry Award winner A Wrinkle in Time
A Circle of Quiet
Along the way, the reader becomes acquainted with the family, friends, and faith of L’Engle. L’Engle would claim that such important elements are not mere accidents of her life, or descriptions that explain her, but that they are patterns of her very existence — her ontos. Thus, A Circle of Quiet
So, take a few hours and walk with Madeleine down the path to dangle your feet in the little brook. But, while you are enjoying the brook, please be sure to argue with Madeleine about some of her assumptions.
* * * * * *
Caveat: You might want to check out the concerns voiced in this Christianity Today article by Donald Hettinga from back in the days when Christianity Today actually practiced a little discernment and voiced concerns.
* * * * * *
Other books in the Crosswicks Journal series:
__________
MADELEINE L’ENGLE BIBLIOGRAPHY (by publication date)
- 18 Washington Square South: A Comedy in One Act, 1944
- The Small Rain, 1945
- Ilsa, 1946
- And Both Were Young, 1949
- Camilla Dickinson, 1951
- A Winter’s Love, 1957
- Meet the Austins, 1960
- A Wrinkle in Time
- The Moon By Night, 1963
- The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas, 1964
- The Arm of the Starfish, 1965
- Camilla, 1965
- The Love Letters, 1966
- A Journey With Jonah, 1967
- The Young Unicorns, 1968
- Dance in the Desert, 1969
- Lines Scribbled on an Envelope and Other Poems, 1969
- The Other Side of the Sun, 1971
- A Circle of Quiet
- A Wind in the Door, 1973
- Everyday Prayers, 1974
- Prayers for Sunday, 1974
- The Risk of Birth, 1974
- The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
, 1974
- Dragons in the Waters, 1976
- The Irrational Season
, 1977
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet, 1978
- The Weather of the Heart, 1978
- Ladder of Angels, 1979
- The Anti-Muffins, 1980
- A Ring of Endless Light, 1980
- Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, 1980
- A Severed Wasp, 1982
- The Sphinx at Dawn, 1982
- And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, 1983
- A House Like a Lotus, 1984
- Trailing Clouds of Glory: Spiritual Values in Children’s Literature, 1985
- Many Waters, 1986
- A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob, 1986
- A Cry Like a Bell, 1987
- Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
, 1988
- An Acceptable Time, 1989
- Sold Into Egypt: Joseph’s Journey into Human Being, 1989
- The Glorious Impossible, 1990
- Certain Women, 1992
- The Rock That is Higher, 1993
- Anytime Prayers, 1994
- Troubling a Star, 1994
- Glimpses of Grace, 1996
- A Live Coal in the Sea, 1996
- Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols, 1996
- Wintersong, 1996
- Bright Evening Star, 1997
- Friends for the Journey, 1997
- Mothers and Daughters, 1997
- Miracle on 10th Street, 1998
- A Full House, 1999
- Mothers and Sons, 1999
- Prayerbook for Spiritual Friends, 1999
- The Other Dog, 2001
- Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, 2001
- The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L’Engle, 2005
- The Joys of Love, 2008
Can anyone know for sure that his or her religion is right? Why or why not?
(Share your answers in the comments below.)
