Pearls of Wisdom
“To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.”
“Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things”
“Though Control in the USA: The Case of the Middle East,” Index on Censorship, July/August 1986, quoted in John H. George, Be Reasonable: Selected Quotations for Inquiring Minds, Prometheus Books, 1994 p. 64
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s
Context: From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things… The less the state is able to employ violence in the defense of the interest of the elite groups that effectively dominate it, the more it becomes necessary to devise techniques of ‘manufacture of consent’… Where obedience is guaranteed by violence, rulers may tend towards a ‘behaviourist’ conception; it is enough that people obey; what they think does not matter too much. Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think.
“The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.”
“He read with a charming full voice, and when everyone was applauding, "how much", he asked, "would you have applauded if you had heard the original?"”
Quam cum suavissima et maxima voce legisset, admirantibus omnibus "quanto" inquit "magis miraremini, si audissetis ipsum!"
De Oratorio, book 3, chapter 56.
Cicero was telling the story of Æschines' return to Rhodes, at which he was requested to deliver Demosthenes' defence of Ctesiphon.
On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)
Context: What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily — whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence — whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
The Confession (c. 452?)
Context: I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time.
And it was there of course that one night in my sleep I heard a voice saying to me: "You do well to fast: soon you will depart for your home country." And again, a very short time later, there was a voice prophesying: "Behold, your ship is ready."' And it was not close by, but, as it happened, two hundred miles away, where I had never been nor knew any person. And shortly thereafter I turned about and fled from the man with whom I had been for six years, and I came, by the power of God who directed my route to advantage (and I was afraid o nothing), until I reached that ship.
“There's always a voice saying the right thing to you somewhere, if you'll only listen for it.”
Source: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Ch. 48
“All the fears never voiced say you have to make your final choice.”
"Childhood's End", on Obscured by Clouds (1972)
Context: You find your eyes are growing moist.
All the fears never voiced say you have to make your final choice.
Harijan (1933, July 8); also in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 61), and in The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi (Prabhu and Rao, eds., 1967, pp. 33-34)
1930s
