
Speech to the United Parents Association, as quoted in The New York Times (6 April 1958)
Speech to the United Parents Association, as quoted in The New York Times (6 April 1958)
Source: On Freedom (1958)
Context: It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 — the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains — triumphed and then ended in failure. … Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.
Jeremy Corbyn faces calls to resolve Labour Brexit divisions https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49787467 BBC News (22 September 2019)
2019
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.”
"The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30 http://books.google.com/books?id=cccDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA30,M1
1970s
Context: We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
Private journal (1858), quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (1952), p. 40
“Before you can escape from your burrow you must know you are trapped. Then there's a chance.”
Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)
“You must behave as if return is certain, not a matter of chance", Jem said.”
Source: Clockwork Angel