
Barbarians inside the Gates?
1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
Speech to a banquet of the Merchant Taylors' Company, London (10 May 1886), quoted in The Times (11 May 1886), p. 12
1880s
Barbarians inside the Gates?
1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
"The Commercial Motive" ibid.
Context: One of the most significant results of the industrial struggle during the past fifty years has been the creation of a condition of a vast inequality of wealth and income. This inequality is so extreme that it now constitutes one of the chief sources of bitterness and strife in modern life.... not that the poor have been getting poorer but that the number and sizes of great fortunes have increased enormously.
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1971/nov/23/unemployment-1#column_1202 in the House of Commons (23 November 1971)
1970s
Free Culture (2004)
Context: A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.
Speech at the 58th session of the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts) (2003)
"Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus: Winning Prizes, Conquering Hearts" by E. Nina Rothe, in Huffington Post (12 June 2013) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-nina-rothe/anand-gandhis-iship-of-th_b_3427564.html
Context: We are closer to understanding ourselves and our environment than we were two centuries or two thousand years ago, so we are definitely more equipped with knowledge and information than the Buddha was, or even Darwin was. Darwin didn’t know about DNA, we know about DNA. Just imagine if we could go back in time and inform Darwin about DNA or inform Buddha about it. What they were dealing with was intuition, with a logical breakdown of what they had observed. We have scientific tools for those things. We are using the energies of the past to create something new and I’m very confident that what I’ve done has never been done before. I feel no pressure about it, I’m just taking the next step.
Speech in Birmingham (5 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp 30-31.
1925
Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)