Independence

There is so much more hue and variety in real life than any model can encompass. The labels “straight”, “gay”, “bi”, are only a lens we use for convenience so we can have a feeling that we are able to manage and contain an infinitely complex reality. People don’t realize that, and implicitly believe that humans should conform to the language labels they happen to have inherited from the way their society arbitrarily parses reality.

We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Many paths lead from the foot of the mountain, but at the peak we all gaze at the single bright moon.

Everybody is unique. Do not compare yourself with anybody else lest you spoil God's curriculum.

Follow your own weird.

All mass movements rank obedience with the highest of virtues and put it on a level with faith: 'union of minds requires not only a perfect accord in the one Faith, but complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and the Roman Pontiff as to God Himself'. [Leo XIII, Sepientiae Christianae. According to Luther, "Disobedience is a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft and dishonest.." Quoted by Jerome Frank, Fate and Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1945), p. 281] Obedience is not only the first law of God, but also the first tenet of a revolutionary party and of fervent nationalism.

Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more readily than people at leisure. Hustling thus tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of individuals into a compact group, incessant action will play a considerable role.

Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it - even though others may hesitate or differ. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.

Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

There are few things as nausiating as pure obediance

Depend upon yourself. Make your judgment trustworthy by trusting it. You can develop good judgment as you do the muscles of your body - by judicious, daily exercise.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

Follow your own weird.

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

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.

Preserving the right to uncensored expression is important not only because it is indispensable for an objective examination of truth claims—it is no accident that dictatorships uniformly suppress speech—but also because it has intrinsic value. Human dignity requires the freedom to express oneself as an individual.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Adversity is the first path to truth

We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.

Without deviation from the norm, ‘progress’ is not possible.

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.

Conventions and rituals are important to keep us on track, moving toward the goals that we have set for ourselves, maintaining the predictability that allows us the leisure to create. It is equally important to shatter the conventions from time with acts that are utterly defiant and shocking.

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

The price we pay for money is paid in liberty.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

At the bottom of a good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.

The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Of heaven and hell I have no opinion, for I have friends in both you see.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

No his mind is not for rent,
to any god or government.
Always hopeful yet discontent,
he knows changes aren't permanent.
But change is.

Always stay in your own movie.

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell -- he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth.

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"

God will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed then indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

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.

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.

A person needs at intervals to separate from family and companions and go to new places. One must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.

Those who would deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

The combined wisdom and genius of all mankind cannot possibly conceive of an argument against liberty of thought.

Intellectual liberty [is] the right to think right and the right to think wrong. Thought is the means by which we endeavor to arrive at truth.

There may or may not be a Supreme Ruler of the universe--but we are certain that man exists, and we believe that freedom is the condition of progress; that it is the sunshine of the mental and moral world, and that without it man will go back to the den of savagery, and wll become the fit associate of wild and ferocious beasts.

Freedom fighters don't always win, but they're always right.

We need people who will dare to risk anything and everything to see things different.

Democratic societies… leave much to be desired, but are certainly the most satisfactory to date. They are based on freedom, talent, chance, and merit, while including a safety net for those who have fallen off the high wire of health and success.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist.

If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.

It is easy to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin - more even than death... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Thoughts are free and subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature...create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy from which new arts flow.

The point of life is not to meet society's standards, but to exceed your own goals.

And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women?  It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes.  That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow.  A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.  

. . .   The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeds to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weights their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.---That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ---That whatever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.

Even if everyone else
Is not doing good,
I alone will.

Even if everyone else
is doing wrong,
I alone will not.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders and know that you are the creator of your destiny.

As long as we require someone else to make us happy, we are slaves.

The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own.  No apologies or excuses.  No one to lean on, rely on, or blame.  The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.  This is the day your life really begins.

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.  In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence—a new relationship to the universe.  Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed.  This is where we have to begin.

Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.

The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.

Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.