Source: Saturn's Children (2008), Chapter 15, “”Revising My Opinions” (pp. 253-254)
Context: She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”
“What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
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Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911–1995Related quotes
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“Man is free, but his freedom ceases when he has no faith in it”
Giacomo Casanova
(1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice
.
Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1, Preface http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/preface2.html
Referenced
Kurien Kunnumpuram
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Kunnumpuram, Kurien, 2011 “Theological Exploration,” Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies 14/2 (July-Dec 2011)
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Max Stirner
(1806–1856) German philosopher
Attributed in Forbes Vol 38 Iss. 2 (1936) p. 18, and in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 275
“We want to know in order to make ourselves free. That is our life: one universal cry for freedom.”
Swami Vivekananda
(1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher
Pearls of Wisdom
Edward Gibbon
(1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
This quotation appeared in an article by Margaret Thatcher, "The Moral Foundations of Society" ( Imprimis, March 1995 https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-moral-foundations-of-society/), which was an edited version of a lecture Thatcher had given at Hillsdale College in November 1994. Here is the actual passage from Thatcher's article:
<blockquote>[M]ore than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.</blockquote>
The italicized passage above originated with Thatcher. In characterizing the Athenians in the article she cited Sir Edward Gibbon, but she seems to have been paraphrasing statements in "Athens' Failure," a chapter of classicist Edith Hamilton's book The Echo of Greece (1957), pp. 47–48 http://www.ergo-sum.net/books/Hamilton_EchoOfGreece_pp.47-48.jpg).
Misattributed
“The man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free.”
Robert LeFevre
(1911–1986) American libertarian businessman
Source: A Way to Be Free: The Autobiography of Robert LeFevre, Volume I, (1999), p. 11