The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)
Context: After hearing incessantly that the people follow him without sense or discretion, he [the political leader] is liable to fall a victim of the delusion which he has created, and to imagine that he possesses some personal attraction, by virtue of which he is followed. The delusion soon develops itself. He will diverge from the authorized track... From habit, the people will move a little in his erratic course. Their compliance augments his delusion, and he will become increasingly regardless of the popular will, and more obstinately intent on his own. He soon becomes monomaniac, and is abandoned except by a few stragglers as crazy as himself; while he interprets the abandonment into ingratitude or heterodoxy, and grows scurrilous, turbulent, and impotent.
“The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.”
"The Individual, Society and the State" (1940) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1940/individual.htm
Context: The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.
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Emma Goldman 109
anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and sp… 1868–1940Related quotes
Source: The Methods of Ethics (1874), Book 4, chapter 5, section 3 (7th ed., 1907)
“I may not have been the greatest Yankee to put on the uniform, but I was the proudest.”
At ceremony retiring his number 1 jersey in 1986. It is also his epitaph, carved into his headstone at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
“The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”
Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)
Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 28
“For man's greatest crime is to have been born.”
Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido.
Segismundo, Act I, Scene II.
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)
Variant: Since man's greatest crime on earth
Is the fatal fact of birth.
(trans. Denis MacCarthy)
"The Individual, Society and the State" (1940) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1940/individual.htm
Context: Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "differentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established.
“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”
History and Utopia (1960)
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
Letter to Jost Winteler (1901), quoted in The Private Lives of Albert Einstein by Roger Highfield and Paul Carter (1993), p. 79 http://books.google.com/books?id=zY7FE9ZyDO0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA79#v=onepage&q&f=false. Einstein had been annoyed that Paul Drude, editor of Annalen der Physik, had dismissed out of hand some criticisms Einstein made of Drude's electron theory of metals.
1900s
Variant: A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.