“A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.”
Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist
As quoted in David Johnson, 'Representing the Cape "Hottentots", from the French Enlightenment to Post-Apartheid South Africa', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40.4 (Summer 2007), 525-52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053727.
“A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.”
Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist
Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.
OSCON 2002
Context: J. C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it.... In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: "If you are explaining, you are losing." If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property.... They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that's why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away.
“No thefts of free will reported.”
Marcus Aurelius book Meditations
Hays translation
XI, 36
Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book XI
“What is government but theft by consent?”
Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves
Source: The Republic of Thieves
“Property isn't theft: it's nothing.”
Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet
Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A propriedade não é roubo: não é nada.