There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in w...hich the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum of liberty to every individual? W...hat do you think a nation is?--a big business concern?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates... him,... sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailor or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy: that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread in his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Municipal laws are a supply to the wisdom of each individual; and, at the same time, by restraining the natural liberty of men, ma...ke private interest submit to the interest of the public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our religion ... is itself profoundly sad--a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants... full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language--so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when the right of the individual is made sacred, when the image of God in human form, whether in marble or in clay, whether in... alabaster or in ebony, is consecrated and inviolable, when men have been taught to look beneath the rags and grime, the pomp and pageantry of mere circumstance and have regard unto the celestial kernel uncontaminated at the core,--when race, color, sex, condition, are realized to be the accidents, not the substance of life, and consequently as not obscuring or modifying the inalienable title to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,--then is mastered the science of politeness, the art of courteous contact, which is naught but the practical application of the principal [sic] of benevolence, the back bone and marrow of all religion; then woman's lesson is taught and woman's cause is won--not the white woman nor the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every man or woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty,--the Better, the Best. The first and worse races are dead. ...The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of the higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are sure that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the... spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »