INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM / RESPONSIBILITY

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost; and not until we live in a society where each can exercise his right of sovereignty at all times without clashing with or violating that of others. The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of actions of any of their number, is self protection. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." - John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" (1865) Most of the more off-putting aspects of the abundant West arise from its freedoms. The first thing we can be sure of about a free society is that it will be teeming and throbbing with things we don't like.

        - Clive James, "The Meaning of Recognition"

"Far less is expected of humans in the twenty-first century than was expected in the nineteenth. Today's society operates around the belief that people can't cope on their own, or face the challenges of life."

        - Frank Furedi, author of "Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age"

"When important issues affecting the life of an individual are decided by somebody else, it makes no difference to the individual whether that somebody else is a king, a dictator, or society at large."

        - James Taggart

Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life.... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.

        - Margaret Thatcher

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand The price of greatness is responsibility. "Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."

"The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills."

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy"

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical."

"That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves."

- Thomas Jefferson "Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms, The one assumes to itself the right of withholding the liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it."

        - Thomas Paine

The best things in life are not free - the best thing in life is being free.

Freedom might not make men happy, but at least it makes them men.
        - Manuel Azana (paraphrased)

Freedom and diversity guard each other.
        - Clive James

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest. Government exists to protect us from each other. We can't afford the government it would take to protect us from ourselves. - Ronald Reagan The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.

        - Thomas Jefferson

People wrongly think that tolerance means merely not disapproving, whereas true tolerance means disapproving while yet permitting.

        - Christopher Ricks

"About seventy-five years ago I learned that I was not God. And so, when the people of the various States want to do something and I can't find anything in the Constitution expressly forbidding them to do it, I say, whether I like it or not: Damn it, let 'em do it."

        - Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Supreme Court Justice

"Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong."

        - John Diefenbaker, former Canadian Prime Minister

A man may purposely, consciously choose for himself even the harmful and the stupid, even the stupidest thing - just so that he will have the right to wish the stupidest thing, and not be bound by the duty to have only intelligent wishes. For this most stupid thing, this whim of ours, gentlemen, may really be more advantageous to us than anything on earth, especially in certain cases. In fact, it may be the most advantageous of all advantages even when it brings us obvious harm and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage. Because, at any rate, it preserves for us the most important and most precious thing - our personality, our individuality."

If a person wants to take his own life, it is his privilege. - Robert A. Heinlein, "To Sail Beyond the Sunset" One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
        - PJ O'Rourke

There are two freedoms, the false where one is free to do what he likes, and the true where he is free to do what he ought.
        - Charles Kingsley

"When a ban is proposed on what someone else wants to do we tend to ask ourselves: 'Would I want to do it?' If the answer is 'No', then we generally go along with it. Instead we should ask: 'Does it hurt anyone else if they do it?' If the answer to that one is 'No', then the law should be dumped."
        - John Humphrys, "The London Times"

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

- George Bernard Shaw The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave. One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government (when a people is fortunate enough to be able to do without it, which is rare) is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows from it. Each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the support of an outside force which, however vigilant one supposes it to be, can never answer all social needs. Man, thus accustomed to seek his well—being only through his own efforts, raises himself in his own opinion as he does in the opinion of others; his soul becomes larger and stronger at the same time.
        - Alexis de Tocqueville

Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.
        - George Will

"Individuals have to accept responsibility for their own bad choices. If every time we choose a turd, society, at great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrener the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all."

        - Tom Robbins, "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas"

"There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

- PJ O'Rourke, "The Liberty Manifesto" The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools. - Sir James Russell Lowell If man is to continue his self-improvement, he must be free to exercise the powers of choice with which he has been endowed. When discrimination is not allowed according to one's wisdom and conscience, both discrimination and conscience will atrophy in the same manner as an unused muscle.

        - FA Harper

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Experience keeps a dear school, but the fool will learn in no other. I happen to think that inhaling cigarette smoke is foolish, but that folly is a basic human right.

        - Woodrow Wilson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. Unless men are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous. Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

        - Mikhail Bakunin

There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set men free.

         - Unknown

Those who say life is worth living at any cost have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they will not betray to stay alive.

"Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom."

"What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free."

"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."

"The case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend. "

- FA Hayek The essence of childishness is an inability to imagine an incompatibility between one's appetite and the world. Growing up involves, above all, a conscious effort to conform one's appetites to a crowded world.
        - George Will, "Statecraft as Soulcraft"

This age ... defines self-fulfillment apart from, even against, the community. The idea of citizenship has become attenuated and is now defined almost exclusively in terms of entitlements.
        - George Will

Perhaps then, I might finish by putting in a word for modern individualism. We are social animals because, as we evolved, reciprocating favours from others in our community assisted our survival and the passing down of our genes. We learn to pick out those who we think will return our favours, and therefore have a strong sense of who we regard as a friend. The trouble is that our instinct leads us to regard others as foe. The very same natural propensity to be communal and socially cohesive, makes us aggressive to outsiders. It has created pogroms, civil strife, war.
In recent years we have become more civilised. The group that we regard as like us, as a friend, as liable to reciprocate our favours, has grown enormously. The free market and modern technology have helped. This has weakened the bond we feel with our immediate community and we see ourselves more as individuals. Social relations have become shallower, but our network wider. We have lost through this, but we have also gained. We fight fewer wars, we kill each other less often, we treat minorities much better, we are less aggressive to outsiders. Doubtless we have become more individualistic and some individuals too selfish. But look at the strife in the world. Look at the Middle East, or Congo, or Somalia... Is it really the case that our biggest social problem is excessive individualism?
        - Daniel Finkelstein, "The Times"

European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.

I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. One neuroeconomist thinks that our moral code is so ingrained that substituting it with formal regulation can lead to worse behaviour. Professor Paul Zak, from Claremont Graduate University in California, cites a fascinating study in which two daycare centres adopted different approaches with late parents. One centre merely reminded parents that turning up late inconvenienced the teacher, who had to stay behind. The other centre imposed a $3 fine. After several weeks, the “ penalty” centre was reporting more latecomers. The theory is that the fine somehow replaced the social undesirability of inconveniencing the teacher. Zak suggests that penalties and regulations “may crowd out the good behaviour that most people, most of the time, follow”. That doesn’t mean that we can dispense with regulations completely — approximately 2 per cent of the population are sociopaths, and are quite happy to predate if conditions allow. So we need a compromise — a skeleton of formal regulation to stop the sociopaths taking advantage, fleshed out with plenty of self-regulation. Thus, we have a neat scientific explanation of why moderately regulated economies are the most creative and thus the wealthiest. “We can’t rely on people to be angels, but too much enforcement risks inhibiting people’s natural mechanisms,” concludes Zak, who spoke last week at a Cambridge University conference on whether moral values are essential in business. “And any regulations have to reflect our underlying, innate sense of values, otherwise they won’t be followed.” His conclusion might have found favour with Adam Smith, whose view that people act in their own self-interest and that they show sympathy with others, are sometimes thought contradictory.

        - Anjana Anhuja, "Adam Smith Was Right", "The Times"

KENNETH MINOGUE

"You are basing (what should be) the rightful conduct of the State on the least capable people in society, and in that way I suspect that you are making more and more people less capable".
        - Kenneth Minogue, Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics

It is by no means a paradox to say that real freedom rests upon self-discipline, and this is the basic virtue which only stable families seem able to provide. Marriage, for example, is an institution commonly supported by conservatives because it is an act of moral seriousness. The fact that the more casual cohabitations of contemporary life commonly fail to generate self-reliance in their children is recognized by conservatives as probably the most alarming problem of our time.
So it is a false paradox to charge conservatives with inconsistency when they insist on linking personal freedom with the moral order. The great enemy of this false paradox was Margaret Thatcher, whose dominance of British politics throughout the Eighties awoke Britain from its postwar slumbers. She was attacked as libertarian and "authoritarian" at the same time, and those who hated her could only explain her policies in terms of selfishness.
Is it vice, however, to link rewards to how people perform? Has not the collapse of Communism taught a useful lesson about the fate of economies detached from incentives? Indeed, is it selfish to work for the things one wants for oneself and others? It would only be selfish if modern production were a zero-sum game, in which what I achieved meant that much less for you. Such a view is contradicted by the history of modern economic growth.
        - Kenneth Minogue, "National Review"

What is the relation between high policy and low morals? The answer is basically simple: low morals amount to giving in to impulse, and impulsiveness soon lands one in the arms of the bureaucracy. This means that the United States, like other Western countries, contains two roughly distinct sets of people: those independent souls who manage their own lives — let us call them the Individualists — and those whose lives constantly place them in contact with authority in the form of policemen, social workers, prison officers, and so on — we may call them the Impulsives. Some examples of Impulsives will be horribly familiar. Promiscuous teenage girls soon find themselves "one-parent families" supervised by a social worker and living on welfare. Those caught with their fingers in the till will soon be keeping the police and prison services in business — and then probation officers.
        - Kenneth Minogue, "National Review"

The permissive society begins in liberation and ends in compulsion. It ends that way because society depends on orderliness, and if it doesn't come from within, it must come from without.
        - Kenneth Minogue, "National Review"

All feminists (like all Marxists) are intellectuals in the sense that they understand the world in terms of theory, but many of them are inevitably, as the old joke goes, intellectuals without an intellect... What became unmistakable in the 1960s, however, was that ideologies are remarkable sets of abstract propositions lacking both the competence of practice and the reflectiveness of theory. An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred. Feminists have, however, been so far protected from one major disaster which bids fair to destroy to plausibility of Marxists: they have never attained the total revolutionary power they seek in order to engineer society closer to their ideas. Just such power was acquired by Marxists in many of the less sophisticated parts of the world, and their governmental bungling has left whole populations impoverished, demoralized, slaughtered, and genuinely oppressed... If your rulers start taking Marx seriously, run for your lives. Millions have done so, but survival is only to the swift.
        - Kenneth Minogue, "The Goddess That Failed", "National Review"

INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM

"I am not a number, I am a free man. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own."

- Number Six, "The Prisoner" "A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."

        - Ramsey Clark

"And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride."
"This god, this one word: 'I' "

- Ayn Rand, "Anthem" "I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number, or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others."

"Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries."

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote: a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority."

"No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as the right to enslave."

"The idea that 'The Public Interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: That the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others."

"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave." "It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there is service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be master."

"The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good."

Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state--and nothing else.

"When ‘the common good’ of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals."

"An individualist is a man who says: "I will not run anyone's life - nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule or be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone - nor sacrifice anyone to myself."

- Ayn Rand Thou art God. Know that and the Way is opened. - Robert Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" Selfishness is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the philantrophist seeking to bring comfort to the needy, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values. - Milton Friedman, "Free To Choose" 'Liberals' now say, for example, that any two adults can go into a house together and watch porn movies, or engage in self-mutilation, gross indeceny or prostitution, and the state has no role to play in any of it : they say that two adults acting in private are free to do what they want - exept, it seems, draw up a rental agreement. If two consenting adults want to sign a contract in which one adult offers a flat, and another adult takes it on, and the contract says, "This lease can be terminated by either side on 28 days notice at any time," they view the lease agreement as though it were some sort of criminal outrage. - ME Synon, "Irish Independent" The great religions (and conservatives are known for approving of God) teach salvation as an individual matter. There are no group discounts in the Ten Commandments, Christ was not a committee, and Allah does not welcome believers into Paradise saying, "You weren't much good yourself, but you were standing near some good people." That we are individuals-unique, disparate and willful - is something we understand instinctively from an early age. No child ever wrote to Santa: 'Bring me -- and a bunch of kids I've never met -- a pony, and we'll share.'

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money-if a gun is held to his head.

When those who are against conservative policies don't have sufficient opposition arguments, they call love of freedom "selfish. " Of course it is-in the sense that breathing is selfish. But because you want to breathe doesn't mean you want to suck the breath out of every person you encounter.

- PJ O'Rourke, "How to Explain Conservatism" "...there will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority was derived, and treats him accordingly." - Thoreau When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects,'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. - Robert A. Heinlein There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. - Robert A. Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" "To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked."

        - Thomas B. Macauley

"Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society."

- Herbert Spencer "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
        - C.S. Lewis, "God in the Dock"

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who *can* be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything." ... "Don't you see that the educated reader *can't* stop reading the highbrow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."
        - C.S. Lewis, "That Hideous Strength" (1946)

If what I do is against god's law, then let god come down here and arrest me.

- Anon Why should my freedom be judged by another's conscience?

        - Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:29

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

- Robert Frost "There is nothing that somebody, somewhere, will not consider immoral." - Unknown "I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children." - Lizard "I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized." - John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" "Social progress does not have to be bought at the price of individual freedom."

        - John Foster Dulles

LEGAL FREEDOM

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. "Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee."

        - F Lee Bailey

"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve."

"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one harms the person or property of another." One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. Useless laws weaken necessary laws. - Charles de Secondat "Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them." I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's. The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. - Albert Camus Law after law breeds a multitude of thieves. Therefore a sensible man says:
If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves;
If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves;
If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves;
If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves. - Lao-Tzu (founder of Taoism), 6th century B. C. # ERIC HOFFER

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all
excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding, when it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
        - from "Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements"

The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.

We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to attain excellence. To discover what a man truly craves but knows he cannot have we must find the field in which he advocates absolute equality. By this test Communists are frustrated Capitalists.

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion — it is an evil government.

Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings... The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people.

In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

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