“I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind.”

— Milton Friedman

Interview with on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)
Context: I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.

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Milton Friedman 158

American economist, statistician, and writer 1912–2006

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Greening of America turns 40 (2010)
Context: I see self-destruction now on a grand scale. That is, the unwillingness to pay for the things society needs. That's the most basic kind of self-destruction. That we're not prepared to pay for schools, we're not prepared to pay for highways. That is self-destruction. What are we doing to ourselves? It is nuts.

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Source: The Golden Notebook

“I think this is a department that reflects the city and reflects it not only in the makeup of the personnel — which is the most diverse department in the city by far — but also in the diversity of our thought and the recognition that policing is a very complicated social contract with the people that live in this city, and that social contract requires action on both parts.”

Charlie Beck (1953) Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department

Quoted in: December 5, 2014, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck earns good reviews; tough challenges lie ahead, Los Angeles Daily News, August 9, 2014, Brenda Gazzar http://www.dailynews.com/government-and-politics/20140809/lapd-chief-charlie-beck-earns-good-reviews-tough-challenges-lie-ahead,

“The issue of press freedom is a constant concern in my interactions with the Chinese government. It’s an issue that I’ve raised with the President here in Burma. I’m pretty blunt and pretty frank about the fact that societies that repress journalists ultimately oppress people as well, and that if you want a society that is free and vibrant and successful, part of that formula is the free flow of information, of ideas, and that requires a free press. […] And we believe that when governments censor or control information, that ultimately that undermines not only the society, but it leads to eventual encroachments on individual rights as well. […] I brought up a basic principle that I stated earlier, which is that a free press is a foundation for any democracy. We rely on journalists to explain and describe the actions of our government. If the government controls the journalists, then it's very difficult for citizens to hold that government accountable.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma in Joint Press Conference at Aung San Suu Kyi Residence in Rangoon, Burma on November 14, 2014 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/14/remarks-president-obama-and-daw-aung-san-suu-kyi-burma-joint-press-confe
2014

“…in the first place, self decapitation is an extremely difficult, not to say dangerous, thing to attempt; and, in the second, it’s suicide, and suicide is a capital offence.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The Mikado (1885)

“This is a free country. A free society throws up these kinds of people, who exercise their freedom in unusual ways. And if this is how he wants to do it, I must accept his constitutional right to do so.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

Mayor of Capetown Helen Zille — cited in: [Cape Argus staff, Artist uses a different stroke on Zille portrait, Cape Argus, South Africa, 7 May 2008, 3, Independent Online]
About

“The most difficult thing is not to want anything.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

“I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

439
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

“The outstanding feature of behavior is that it is often quite easy to recognize but extremely difficult or impossible to describe with precision.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, "An Essay on Mind". Reprinted in Toward Definition of Mind (Jordan Ma Scher, editor). Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1962. p. 92
1960s

“Things appear very complex but underneath they are quite simple. People complicate things by super-imposing their own viewpoints and advantages. If you remove all that is superfluous, most problems have very simple solutions.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

26
Ki Sayings (2003)

“I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind.”

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Milton Friedman 158

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