“We cannot, as a people, remain mute and free.”

— Gerry Spence

Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 19 : The Benevolent Dictator, p. 233

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Gerry Spence46

American lawyer 1929

J. G. Ballard book Crash

"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)

“So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

Act I, sc. ii
Empedocles on Etna (1852)

“Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

“We cannot become what we need by remaining what we are.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

“Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper —
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Words" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/words.htm <br class="br">Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

“Realizing later that it was not by choice that we remained mute but by a conscious effort on the part of those in power, I realized that my art could only be that of protest—a protest against what I felt to be a death sentence.”

Malaquías Montoya (1938) American artist

On how he used artwork as a form of protest (as quoted in “’What better function for art at this time than as a voice for the voiceless’: The Work of Chicano Artist Malaquías Montoya” https://nacla.org/news/2019/02/17/%E2%80%9Cwhat-better-function-art-time-voice-voiceless%E2%80%9D-work-chicano-artist-malaqu%C3%ADas; 2019 Feb 15)

“In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be, by remaining what we are.”

Max DePree (1924–2017) American businessman and writer

Variant: We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
Source: Leadership Is an Art