Benjamin R. Barber Quotes (15 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Benjamin R. Barber: 15 quotes0 likes

Famous Benjamin R. Barber Quotes

“I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and nonlearners.”

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: The Reader's digest vol. 140, no. 837-842 (1992), p. 159

“Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.”

Benjamin R. Barber

A Passion for Democracy: American Essays (2000) p. 211

“Not only psychiatry itself but also the values reflected in its statistical definition of “normalcy” serve to condition men to habitual, unthinking, conformist behavior.”

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 68-69

“The real struggle is in fact not for but against the minds of men. Persuasion as a form of coercion represents an assault on consciousness and intentionality.”

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 71

“Under these circumstances, men lose sight of themselves and escape into the security of work or sociability or other forms of what Vidich and Bensman have called the “externalization of the self.” Vidich and Bensman sketch a troubling picture of such men: “What is left of the personality is the dulled, autonomic ritualization of behavior where … no disturbing interferences are allowed to enter into thought. … Personal and social life becomes barren, and the personal mechanics and daily routine of living become the end-all of existence. All types of activity whose operation is based upon an objective, external, automatic rhythm to which an individual can bend himself serve the function of enabling him to lose himself in an objective ceremony.””

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 69, quotation is from A. J. Vidich and J. Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society (New York), p. 315

“There is a therapy of self-indulgence and adjustment which is little more than another weapon in the arsenal of social conformity, and there is a therapy which “makes the unconscious conscious, enlarges the scope of awareness.” There is a socialization which turns curious children into adult automatons in a social environment of repressive uniformity, and there is a socialization which turns selfish, impulsive children into self-aware and deliberate participants in a larger community.”

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 72, quotation is from Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself, p. 101

Benjamin R. Barber Quotes

“Those who have read the Russian novelists Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn know how effective the debilitation can be which treats free actions as clinical abnormalities requiring hospitalization.”

Benjamin R. Barber

… Acts of rebellion formerly regarded as manifestation of mere bestiality are now condoned as pathological outbursts; the possibility that such acts are the intentional projects of conscious men who are at once both demanding and expressing freedom is beyond the pale of conception. Thus are men robbed not only of their freedom but also of their dignity as creative human beings.
Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 68

“We know ourselves by understanding our temporality, our embeddedness in time, our connection to roots—even roots from which we have knowingly severed ourselves.”

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), p. 22

“Civility is a work of the imagination, for it is through the imagination that we render others sufficiently like ourselves for them to become subjects of tolerance and respect, if not always affection.”

Benjamin R. Barber

A Passion for Democracy: American Essays (2000) p. 211

“A form of influence such as advertising sets out intentionally to insulate reactors (mindless consumers) from the more conscious and critical selves (potential abstainers) not by multiplying alternatives (as laisser-faire advocates of the market economy would like to believe) but by provoking dormant and partial desires in a way that circumvents the normal, conscious, rational process.”

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 69-70

“The American political system is a remarkable example of the coexistence — sometimes harmonious, more often uncomfortable — of all three dispositions. Americans, we might say, are anarchists in their values (privacy, liberty, individualism, property, and rights); realists in their means (power, law, coercive mediation, and sovereign adjudication); and minimalists in their political temper (tolerance wariness of government, pluralism, and such institutionalizations of caution as the separation of powers and judicial review.”

Benjamin R. Barber

Source: Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age (2003), p. 5