Sigmund Freud quote: “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”

“You don't have any civil liberties if you're dead.”

Pat Roberts (1936) American politician

[CNN, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0603/26/le.01.html, 2006-03-26, CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, 2006-08-22]

“We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Greeting to the American Committee for Protection of Foreign-born (9 January 1940); later inscribed on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.
1940s

“Civilized people everywhere have recognized that terrorists threaten every nation that loves liberty and cherishes the protection of individual rights. Respect for human dignity and individual freedoms reaffirms a core tenet of civilized people everywhere.”

George W. Bush Proclamation 7513

Proclamation 7513 (December 2001)
2000s, 2001

“Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Popular Government: Its Essence, Its Permanence and Its Perils, chapter 4, p.90 (1913).

“The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth century.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)

“The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Source: Little Essays of Love and Virtue http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15687/15687-h/15687-h.htm (1922), Ch. 7

“Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.
If another man has not the right to think, you have not even the right to think that he thinks wrong. If every man has not the right to think, the people of New Jersey had no right to make a statute, or to adopt a constitution — no jury has the right to render a verdict, and no court to pass its sentence.
In other words, without liberty of thought, no human being has the right to form a judgment. It is impossible that there should be such a thing as real religion without liberty. Without liberty there can be no such thing as conscience, no such word as justice. All human actions — all good, all bad — have for a foundation the idea of human liberty, and without Liberty there can be no vice, and there can be no virtue.
Without Liberty there can be no worship, no blasphemy — no love, no hatred, no justice, no progress.
Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds — but with that word realized — with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.

“Though its fame is much restricted by its specialized nature, there is no doubt that Panini's grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Professor A. L. Basham in: Daya Kishan Thussu Communicating India's Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Ab_QAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA47, Palgrave Macmillan, 24 October 2013, p. 47.

“Though its fame is much restricted by its specialized nature, there is no doubt that Panini's grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.”

Arthur Llewellyn Basham (1914–1986) British historian and Indologist

Professor A. L. Basham in: Daya Kishan Thussu Communicating India's Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Ab_QAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA47, Palgrave Macmillan, 24 October 2013, p. 47.

“Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to Love.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

One (1988)

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Sigmund Freud 147

Related quotes

Related topics