Notable Quotable 246

Joel Walbert

Apr 09, 2024

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Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

- Henry David Thoreau

Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.

- Dante Alighieri

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The more the panic grows, the more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror.

- Ernst Jünger

Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens.

- J.R.R. Tolkien

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In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

- George Orwell, 1984

Never forget:

dupes believe, slaves fear, and rebels defy.

- Mark Mirabello

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

- Henry David Thoreau

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

- John Keats

He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.

- Salvador de Madariaga