
2000s, 2003, Address to the National Endowment for Democracy (November 2003)
Remarks by German Chancellor Angela Merkel before a joint session of Congress on November 04, 2009. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,659196,00.html
Dokumentation: Angela Merkels Rede im US-Kongress im Wortlaut http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article5079678/Angela-Merkels-Rede-im-US-Kongress-im-Wortlaut.html
Context: Freedom is the very essence of our economy and society. Without freedom the human mind is prevented from unleashing its creative force. But what is also clear is that this freedom does not stand alone. It is freedom in responsibility and freedom to exercise responsibility.
2000s, 2003, Address to the National Endowment for Democracy (November 2003)
Remarks by President Obama and Chancellor Merkel in an Exchange of Toasts on June 07, 2011. http://www.newsroomamerica.com/story/137358/remarks_by_president_obama_and_chancellor_merkel_in_an_exchange_of_toasts.html
Context: History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in about 22 years ago. […] The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the Iron Curtain that divided Germany and Europe, and indeed the world, into two blocs.
Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Ten, Sartre, p. 215
On Kate Bush
The Kate Bush Story (2014)
Context: Creativity comes from the freedom to fail. And freedom to fail comes from experimentation, and that's what gives something its individuality. And, you know, I think her courage, which is the positive way of interpreting it, or bloody-mindedness, which is the negative, is part of what gives her real value as an artist.
“Man-made environmental disasters force nature’s hand to unleash its fury on humankind.”
The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019
"In the Storm" in Le Socialiste http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/05/01.htm as translated by Mitch Abidor (1 - 8 May 1904)
Context: The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.
And its in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm.
The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world – this world of economic, political and social fetishism – constantly wraps us in.
The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these “statesmen” or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence.
War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is co-extensive with the consumption of delightful play activity. Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not—as it is now — a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful.
If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.
No one should ever work.
Workers of the world... relax! </center
Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 6, At Rest Versus In Motion, p. 194