Quotes about independence
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“Men never respect what they have made themselves. This is why an elective king never possesses the moral power of a hereditary sovereign, because he is not noble enough, that is to say he does not possess that kind of greatness independent of men and that is the work of time.”

Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821) Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat

"Of Founders and the Political Constitution," p. 72
Against Rousseau (1795)

Men, Time

“There can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine.”

Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) Polish politician and Prime Minister

2014 Crisis in Ukraine. Perspectives, Reflections, International Reverberations, ASLAN Publishing House, 9788393914173, 2015 https://books.google.com/books?id=GAdOCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT7,

“Can you see other people's battles as your own? There are so many similarities in every war in this world. Some are fighting for freedom and independence. Some fight for principles and ideals. But there are also those who fight only for their blind faith and ego.”

Titon Rahmawan

War, People, World, Faith

Titon Rahmawan

War, People, World, Faith

“Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

“God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: The Irrational Season

God

“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Education, Personality, Country

“The universe is the way it is, whether we like
it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent
of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh
or pointless, but that alone doesn ' t require God to actually exist.”

Lawrence M. Krauss (1954) American physicist

Source: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

God, World, Way, Universe

“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Self-Reliance

Solitude, Perfection

“Strong and independent? I’m neither. I’m just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Reality, Strong

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Love, Life, Wisdom, School

“Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.”

John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) American business magnate and philanthropist

Help

“Maturity comes in three stages: dependence, independence and interdependence”

Jenna Jameson book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

Source: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

Dependency

“… besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.”

Bryce Courtenay The Power of One

Source: The Power of One

Love

“Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

Cats, Thinking

“She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.”

Ann Brashares book Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Love, Strong

“Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Act V
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

Soul, Dependency

“Be an independent thinker at all times, and ignore anyone who attempts to define you in a limiting way.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

Way, Time, Attitude

“The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Variant: The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence

Children, Birthday

“Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)
Context: As I trace the route to his apartment, the twists and turns, and pass once more the old tree opposite his house, I am struck by a sudden thought: memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

Love, Way, Reality, Memory

“If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

World

“Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities.
And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine — each was discovered by one man.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.

Life, Health, Communication, Thinking

“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Source: Lonesome Traveler

“The small are always dependent on the great; they are “small” precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other “greats” and who can transform it in an original manner.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 35

Thinking, Dependency

“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”

James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds

Source: The Wisdom of Crowds

Decision

“The more independent you are of him, the more interested he will be.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

“But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Feeling, Time

“It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;… the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Source: Phenomenology of Spirit

Life, Truth, Freedom, Personality

“… even the most independent people sometimes needed help. And if I'd learned nothing else from my life thus far, it was that you don't always end up where you think you're going.”

Margaret Peterson Haddix book Just Ella

Source: Just Ella

Life, People, Thinking, Learning

“I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Law

“We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.”

James Baldwin book Nobody Knows My Name

Source: Nobody Knows My Name

People, Education

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Independence Day address (1821)
Context: America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

Search, Freedom, Heart

“A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

Marriage, Intelligence

“A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Heart

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

World, Communication

“They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.”

Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States

Source: A People's History of the United States

Women, Democracy

“If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Money, World, Hope, Knowledge

“I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.”

Bryce Courtenay The Power of One

Source: The Power of One

Learning

“Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age - and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence - still did not quite feel grown up?”

Dodie Smith (1896–1990) English novelist and playwright

Source: The Town in Bloom

Age, World, Feeling

“But then I had long mistaken being spoiled for being strong, being defiant for being independent, being reckless for being brave.”

Tami Hoag (1959) American writer

Source: Dark Horse

Strong

“Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

Learning, Time

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Sect. 318, as translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)

Life, Science

“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Variant: The fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Hurt, Personality, Hurtful

“Payne nailing him in the face woke him up.
George brought him back his independence.
But Beth handed him his crown.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Avenged

“I often warn people: "Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no "I" in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an "I" in independence, individuality and integrity.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

People, Way

“It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

Courage

“The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

Exercises, Freedom, Country

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: 2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

Thinking

“I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Love, Men, World, Courage

“He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 2 “The Great Kitchen” (p. 18)
Context: It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.

Happiness

“There is no dignity
quite so impressive,
and no independence
quite so important,
as living within your means.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

“But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Loneliness

“I don't like favors; they oppress and make me fell like a slave. I'd rather do everything for myself, and be perfectly independent.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

“Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

People

“The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence -- these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: The World As I See It

Love, Justice, Star, Knowledge

“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Epitaph, upon his instructions to erect a "a plain die or cube … surmounted by an Obelisk" with "the following inscription, and not a word more…because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered." It omits that he had been President of the United States, a position of political power and prestige, and celebrates his involvement in the creation of the means of inspiration and instruction by which many human lives have been liberated from oppression and ignorance.
Posthumous publications

Freedom, Universe

“But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Hope

“In every country where independence has taken the place of liberty, the first desire of a manly heart is to possess a weapon which at once renders him capable of defence or attack, and, by rendering its owner fearsome, makes him feared.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Fear, Heart, Country

“Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22 (1961)

Exercises, Freedom, Country

“When I'm single, I'm this fabulous, independent, confident woman, and then I get involved with one disastrous man after another and I turn into this needy, insecure, fearful girl who becomes frightened of her own shadow.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Dune Road

Fear, Confidence, Girl

“All the action adventure girls have red hair," he said. "Whenever it is an independent girl, not a sidekick person, when she has her own mind or does as good as the guys, she has red hair.”

Marion Roach (1956) American writer

Source: Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair

Guy, Girl, Personality

“Philip Tetlock has just produced a study which suggests we should view expertise in political forecasting--by academics or intelligence analysts, independent pundits, journalists or institutional specialists--with the same skepticism that the well-informed now apply to stockmarket forecasting… It is the scientific spirit with which he tackled his project that is the most notable thing about his book, but the findings of his inquiry are important and, for both reasons, everyone seriously concerned with forecasting, political risk, strategic analysis and public policy debate would do well to read the book.”

Philip E. Tetlock (1954) American political science writer

Paul Monk, Australian Financial Review, cited in: Philip E. Tetlock. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, 2015. Back cover.
About

Books, Intelligence, Study, Reading

“Mathematics because of its nature and structure is peculiarly fitted for high school instruction [Gymnasiallehrfach]. Especially the higher mathematics, even if presented only in its elements, combines within itself all those qualities which are demanded of a secondary subject. It engages, it fructifies, it quickens, compels attention, is as circumspect as inventive, induces courage and self-confidence as well as modesty and submission to truth. It yields the essence and kernel of all things, is brief in form and overflows with its wealth of content. It discloses the depth and breadth of the law and spiritual element behind the surface of phenomena; it impels from point to point and carries within itself the incentive toward progress; it stimulates the artistic perception, good taste in judgment and execution, as well as the scientific comprehension of things. Mathematics, therefore, above all other subjects, makes the student lust after knowledge, fills him, as it were, with a longing to fathom the cause of things and to employ his own powers independently; it collects his mental forces and concentrates them on a single point and thus awakens the spirit of individual inquiry, self-confidence and the joy of doing; it fascinates because of the view-points which it offers and creates certainty and assurance, owing to the universal validity of its methods. Thus, both what he receives and what he himself contributes toward the proper conception and solution of a problem, combine to mature the student and to make him skillful, to lead him away from the surface of things and to exercise him in the perception of their essence. A student thus prepared thirsts after knowledge and is ready for the university and its sciences. Thus it appears, that higher mathematics is the best guide to philosophy and to the philosophic conception of the world (considered as a self-contained whole) and of one’s own being.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 40.

Truth, World, School, Law

“There had to be one man in town independent enough to sass the banker!”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“In most of the old colonial world, the struggle for independence is coming to an end. Even in areas behind the Curtain, that which Jefferson called "the disease of liberty" still appears to be infectious. With the passing of ancient empires, today less than 2 percent of the world's population lives in territories officially termed "dependent." As this effort for independence, inspired by the American Declaration of Independence, now approaches a successful close, a great new effort — for interdependence — is transforming the world about us. And the spirit of that new effort is the same spirit which gave birth to the American Constitution. That spirit is today most clearly seen across the Atlantic Ocean. The nations of Western Europe, long divided by feuds far more bitter than any which existed among the 13 colonies, are today joining together, seeking, as our forefathers sought, to find freedom in diversity and in unity, strength.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, Address at Independence Hall

World, Disease, Birth, Effort

“Flaubert and Nietzsche have emphasized the importance of standing up and walking in the process of thinking. The peripatetics were perhaps motivated by the same awareness. Yet purposeful walking — what we call marching — is an enemy of thought and is used as a powerful instrument for the suppression of independent thought and the inculcation of unquestioned obedience.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1960)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Motivation, Thinking

“As for charity, it is injurious unless it helps the recipient become independent of it.”

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874–1960) American financier and philanthropist

Interview with Samuel Johnson Woolf, quoted in Drawn from Life (1932)

Help

“For nearly the whole of the next century [c. 13th century], Gujarat remained independent. Perhaps no other Indian dynasty put up a more sustained or successful resistance against the Muslims for a longer period.”

Ram Gopal (1925) Indian author and historian

Quoted from S.R. Goel, (1994) Heroic Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders, 636 AD to 1206 AD.
Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D.

Success

“Now the battle for Canadian independence does have to be fought again, but against a new form of servitude. Our struggle today is different from that of the colonial peoples, fighting against national enslavement imposed upon them by the armed forces of foreign imperialists. We are threatened with complete national enslavement to a foreign power, but that power is not, at least not yet, imposing its control by the force of arms. Canada is being sold into United States control by "her own" ruling class; the parasitic, speculative, Canadian manipulators of stock market deals, politics and governmental concessions, who are enriching themselves by trading the national future of Canada for junior partnerships in the United States monopolies.”

Tim Buck (1891–1973) Canadian politician

Thirty Years – 1922-1952 The Story of the Communist Movement in Canada

People, Future, Fight, Partnership

“I hope you never need no one,
Hope you treasure your independence.
I hope you never fall in love
With someone like you.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Hope You Never
Lyrics, Songs and Music from "She's the One" (1996)

Love, Hope

“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands. As long therefore as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or any thing else. But our citizens will find employment in this line till their numbers, and of course their productions, become too great for the demand both internal and foreign.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Jay (23 August 1785); published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1953), edited by Julian P. Boyd, vol. 8, p. 426
1780s

Wedding, Country

“When I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tenency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets — it not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole… That God is one, and that all the works and the feelings He has called into existence are ONE; this is a truth (a biblical and scriptural truth too) not in my opinion developed to the apprehension of most people in its really deep and unfanthomable meaning. There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe. Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write you on this subject.”

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) English mathematician, considered the first computer programmer

In a letter to Andrew Crosse, as quoted in Eugen Kölbing's Englische Studien, Volume 19 https://archive.org/stream/englischestudien19leipuoft#page/158/mode/1up (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland, "Byron's Daughter", p. 158.

God, War, People, Truth

“A free man - is a man who is free internally. As all other people, externally he or she depends on society. Internally he or she is independent. A society can become liberated externally - from oppression, but it can become free only when the majority of people are free internally.”

Simon Soloveychik (1930–1996) Russia writer and philosopher

Who Is a Free Man. What Is Freedom? http://parentingforeveryone.com/freeman/ <br class="br">Chelovek Svobodny (Free Man) (1994)

People, Dependency

“Now, the truth of the matter is that the idea of the meaning of the word 'federal' underwent a change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the states gave up their sovereignty in the Calhounian sense. And if you have any doubt about that, let me just read a sentence from George Washington. 'It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

So all the rights of independent sovereignty, or some of those rights, have been surrendered.
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

Truth, Idea, Sense, Change

“The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite. The party came together in the 1850s in opposition to the wealthy slaveholders who controlled the federal government. Democrats acting on their behalf insisted that America’s primary principle was the Constitution's protection of property, and they pushed legislation to let planters monopolize the country’s resources at the expense of the working. … Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity. Northerners and hardscrabble Westerners flocked to that vision, and elected Lincoln to the White House in 1860.”

Heather Cox Richardson American historian

"Bring Back the Party of Lincoln" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/opinion/bring-back-the-party-of-lincoln.html?_r=0 (3 September 2014), The New York Times, New York

History, Idea, Housing, Dependency

“The Army of Northern Virginia. Under the superb command of Marse Robert that army's battle flag came close to being a national flag of an independent Confederate States of America. Thank God it did not. But neither were those who fought under that banner executed, imprisoned, permanently disenfranchised, or exiled, as the losers in most other civil wars have been. As Lincoln advised, U. S. Grant, and William T. Sherman 'let 'em up easy'. Thereafter, the battle flag was flown for some bad purposes, as the emblem of the Klan and the Democratic Party's southern wing.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention https://archive.is/QBuxT (22 June 2015), by M. Scheuer. <br class="br">2010s

God, War

“LaStampa has always been a free newspaper because of its economical sustainability, and we're proud of it. It's the only way for a newspaper to be independent.”

John Elkann (1976) Italian businessman

The future of newspaper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyiowqNu23s, LaStampa, 21-06-17

Way

“The investigation of the form and brightness of the rings or rays surrounding the image of a star as seen in a good telescope, when a diaphragm bounded by a rectilinear contour is placed upon the object-glass, though sometimes tedious is never difficult. The expressions which it is necessary to integrate are always sines and cosines of multiples of the independent variable, and the only trouble consists in taking properly the limits of integration. Several cases of this problem have been completely worked out, and the result, in every instance, has been entirely in accordance with observation. These experiments… have seldom been made except by those whose immediate object was to illustrate the undulatory theory of light. There is however a case of a somewhat different kind; which in practice recurs perpetually, and which in theory requires for its complete investigation the value of a more difficult integral; I mean the usual case of an object-glass with a circular aperture. The desire of submitting to mathematical investigation every optical phænomenon of frequent occurrence has induced me to procure the computation of the numerical values of the integral that presents itself in this inquiry: and I now beg leave to lay before the Society the calculated table, with a few remarks upon its application.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Star, Mathematics, Problem, Light

“Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out — and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all “aliens”, the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia — that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!"”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 41, pp. 262–66
Collected Works

Freedom

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s

Men, People, Knowledge, Reading

“Such a tendency has the slave-trade to debauch men's minds, and harden them to every feeling of humanity! For I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men—No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall. And, had the pursuits of those men been different, they might have been as generous, as tender-hearted and just, as they are unfeeling, rapacious and cruel. Surely this traffic cannot be good, which spreads like a pestilence, and taints what it touches! which violates that first natural right of mankind, equality and independency, and gives one man a dominion over his fellows which God could never intend! For it raises the owner to a state as far above man as it depresses the slave below it; and, with all the presumption of human pride, sets a distinction between them, immeasurable in extent, and endless in duration! Yet how mistaken is the avarice even of the planters? Are slaves more useful by being thus humbled to the condition of brutes, than they would be if suffered to enjoy the privileges of men? The freedom which diffuses health and prosperity throughout Britain answers you—No. When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faithful! You stupify them with stripes, and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance; and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them; and that they come from a climate, where nature, though prodigal of her bounties in a degree unknown to yourselves, has left man alone scant and unfinished, and incapable of enjoying the treasures she has poured out for him!—An assertion at once impious and absurd. Why do you use those instruments of torture? Are they fit to be applied by one rational being to another? And are ye not struck with shame and mortification, to see the partakers of your nature reduced so low? But, above all, are there no dangers attending this mode of treatment? Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection? […] But by changing your conduct, and treating your slaves as men, every cause of fear would be banished. They would be faithful, honest, intelligent and vigorous; and peace, prosperity, and happiness, would attend you.”

Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) African abolitionist

Chap. V
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

Men, God, War, Happiness

“I knew van Gogh less intimately. I spoke to him for the first time in 1887 in a popular eatery near 'La Fourche', Avenue de Clichy, [Paris], (closed). A huge windowed room was decorated with his canvases. He exhibited at the 'Independants', [Paris] in 1888, 1889, 1890..”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

Quotes, 1881 - 1890, Letter to Maurice Beaubourg', August 1890

Time

“Poincaré, the strongest figure who succeeded Clemenceau, attempted to make an independent Rhineland under the patronage and control of France. This had no chance of success. He did not hesitate to try to enforce reparation on Germany by the invasion of the Ruhr. This certainly imposed compliance with the treaties on Germany, but it was severely condemned by British and American opinion…A rift opened between Lloyd George and Poincaré, whose bristling personality hampered his firm and far-sighted policies.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Winston Churchill, The Second World War. Volume One: The Gathering Storm (London: The Reprint Society, 1950), pp. 28-29.
About

Chance, Success, Personality

“By the principles of the Declaration of Independence, majority rule in a free society is not an end in itself, nor is it a source of the purposes served by free government. Majority rule exists to secure the rights with which all human persons are "endowed by their Creator." The recognition of the origin of these rights, in God and nature, comes before any action of any majority. Only as we all recognize that "the just powers of government" exist to secure the equal rights possessed by every human being, whether in the majority or minority, can tyranny be prevented.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

God, Nature, Personality

“Neither space nor time has any existence outside the system of evolving relationships that comprises the universe. Physicists refer to this feature of general relativity as background independence.”

Lee Smolin book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

Universe, Time

“Douglas's doctrine of 'popular sovereignty' meant no more than that: in a democracy justice is the interest of the majority, which is 'the stronger'. Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion and one which was not justified merely by the counting of heads.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln Douglas Debates http://archive.li/CFqbg (1959), p. xi <br class="br">1950s

Justice, Democracy, Dependency

“All men are by nature born equally free and independent.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Remarks on Annual Elections (1775)

Men, Nature

“The embarrassing truth — the brontosaurus in the broom closet that nobody wants to talk about — is that the Republican Party was never the party of freedom. That Goldwater business in the 1960s was a fluke, immediately snuffed out by "older, wiser heads" in the GOP like those of Nelson Rockefeller, Weeping Willy Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Romney. The Republican Party was created in the 1850s by northeastern mercantilists just like them, to crush the hopes of poor southerners for individual liberty and independence, and keep them bound in serfdom, paying 80 percent of all taxes collected in America.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"The Brontosaurus in the Broom Closet" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle541-20091018-05.html 18 October 2009.

Truth, Hope, Business, Freedom

“As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Universe

“In addition, profits are so completely subordinated in Germany and Italy to requirements of a militarily conceived national interest and of full employment that the maintenance of the profit principle is purely theoretical. Profits have lost their autonomy as an independent, not to say the supreme, goal of economic activity.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 149

“A central purpose of this book is to identify a framework which might link at important points several of the now independent approaches to the understanding of complex organizations.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Source: Organizations in Action, 1967, p. viii

Books, Understanding

“Enemies are at work day and night in the material realm. Chief among these are ignorance, carelessness, and greed. Operating independently or together, they have wrought enormous destruction.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 75

Night

“A study of attorneys found that the attorneys whose pictures were judged independently to be the better-looking ones were able to earn about 12% more per year than the less good-looking ones. The better-looking attorneys worked longer hours, but even when that and dozens of other variables were controlled for, the better-looking attorneys were able to bill significantly more per hour. Needless to say, the male attorneys were ranked as much less attractive than the women, increasing the gap in women’s pay over men’s. The bigger the gap in looks, the bigger was the gap in pay. The more time passed, the more the gap widened. Sometimes life isn’t fair.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 199-200.

Life, Women, Men, Study

“The convention by which the great events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for a long time — till the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a very few artists — perhaps only Rembrandt and Caravaggio in the first rank — were independent enough to stand against it. And I think that this convention, which was an element in the so-called grand manner, became a deadening influence on the European mind. It deadened our sense of truth, even our sense of moral responsibility.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 5: The Hero as Artist

Truth, History, Thinking, Sense

“She regarded it as a first charge of her slender war-budget to see that French and Dutch independence were maintained against Philip. This was secured, partly by English help and by the holding of the seas, and partly by domestic alliance of the Calvinists with Catholic 'politiques' averse to Spanish domination; it followed that an element of liberality and toleration very rare in the Europe of that day made itself felt in France and in Holland in a manner agreeable to Elizabeth's eclectic spirit.”

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) Historian

A Shortened History of England (1959)

War, Help, Sea

“In so far as we are individuals, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of this universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey. We are subject to the determination of the physical world. But each man is also a person, he is not subject to the stars and atoms; for he subsists entirely with the very subsistence of his spiritual soul, and the latter is in him a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Scholasticism and Politics (1940)

World, Law, Soul, Star

“As we did before in 1994, I feel we have a capacity to do so again. We succeeded in resolving our problems by peaceful means when everybody expected war and violence… We have one of the best constitutions in the world. We should be proud of this constitution, which provides the framework for a functioning multiparty democracy, independent courts and other institutions that stand for [the] advancement of human rights… He said the country had already held three elections and that two presidents had relinquished their power through constitutional means. Although former president Thabo Mbeki had left under difficult conditions, even that had been done constitutionally… These are all signs of growing constitutional maturity. Our democracy is growing up and there are open debates which will take us to robust contestations.”

F. W. de Klerk (1936) South African politician

Speech in Durban https://web.archive.org/web/20150919172235/http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/de-klerk-sanguine-about-sa-1.427715#.WhPN0EpKvqY (2008) <br class="br">2000s, 2008

War, World, Peace, Feeling