Letter to K.S. Barantsevich (March 30, 1888)
Letters
Paul Kurtz (1983) In defense of secular humanism, p. 16
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
Context: You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
“Anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding is like a blind man on the right road.”
Plato, Republic, 506c
Plato, Republic
As quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (1992) by Rosalie Maggio, p. 130
Mohammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London, 1967), pp.67-68. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian muslims: Who are they.
Variant: Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo
"Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Context: Yesterday, there was a tsar, and there were slaves; today there is no tsar, but the slaves remain; tomorrow there will be only tsars. We march in the name of tomorrow's free man — the royal man. We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual — in the name of man. Wars, imperialist and civil, have turned man into material for warfare, into a number, a cipher. Man is forgotten, for the sake of the sabbath. We want to recall something else to mind: that the sabbath is for man.
The only weapon worthy of man — of tomorrows's man — is the word.
God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925). p. 86
