“The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.”
As quoted in "Boris Pasternak" in I.F. Stone's Weekly (3 November 1958), § "Words Which Apply to Us As Well As Russia"; later in The Best of I.F. Stone (2006), p. 43
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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Borís Pasternak 40
Russian writer 1890–1960Related quotes

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 67

Journal entry (10 December 1801)
Context: Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.”
"The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30 http://books.google.com/books?id=cccDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA30,M1
1970s
Context: We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 11 at resologist.net Ch. 11 at sacred-texts.com http://www.sacred-texts.com/fort/damn/damn11.htm
Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 137.

Political Register, LXXV, pp. 364-365 (4 February 1832).

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 44 - (Gandhi said the same thing in All men are brothers; Simone Weil too, at the beginning of L'enracinement (the translator).

On Popsugar, June 5, 2017 https://www.popsugar.com/news/Meet-Transgender-Activist-Abby-Stein-43598113
2017