A Quote by Gene Sharp
The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
The essential psychological requirement of a free society is the willingness on the part of the individual to accept responsibility for his life. - Edith Packer
When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny.
The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed ... The government of the revolution is liberty's despotism against tyranny.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
I can't enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole, I see that things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree.
If there were an exact and universal scale of punishments and crimes, we would have a fairly reliable and shared instrument to measure the degree of tyranny and liberty, of the basic humanity or malice of the different nations.
Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.
[Albert Camus]didn't have much hope that things would work out, but he wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of violence that once such violence is created there's no more room for reflection. And there's no mediating position. If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs, they've all created so much horror that one starts to wonder how these peoples can live together, after having done what they have. Already the violence has reached such a degree that everybody is living in hate, there's no possibility of reflection, no mediating position.
You would have to say of John Howard's government that he has tended to go after things with a fair degree of determination, and I would have thought.. I don't see any reason why that should suddenly disappear now that he has control of both houses.
The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
The result is that a generation of physicists is growing up who have never exercised any particular degree of individual initiative, who have had no opportunity to experience its satisfactions or its possibilities, and who regard cooperative work in large teams as the normal thing. It is a natural corollary for them to feel that the objectives of these large teams must be something of large social significance.
For them that must obey authority/That they do not respect in any degree/Who despise their jobs, their destinies/Speak jealously of them that are free
Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what its form; the free man will resist it if his courage serves.
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
I am no police, I don't even have any educational degree, but I have a degree in life management.
Related Authors
Allen W. Wood Quotes
American
Professor
Clayton Christensen Quotes
American
Professor
Glenn Reynolds Quotes
American
Professor
Gordon S. Wood Quotes
American
Professor
Jeffrey Pfeffer Quotes
American
Professor
Jerry A. Coyne Quotes
American
Professor
Michael Hudson Quotes
American
Professor
Richard A. Falk Quotes
American
Professor
Robert S. Kaplan Quotes
American
Professor
Ruth Simmons Quotes
American
Professor
Seyyed Hossein Nasr Quotes
Iranian
Professor