A Quote by Michael Novak

In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.

Michael Novak

Quote Topics

Been Condition Default Free History Human Most Rare Societies Society Tyranny Very

Quote Author

Michael Novak
American - Novelist
September 9, 1933 - February 17, 2017

I think that in free societies, and we're constantly talking about living in free societies, aren't we, in contradiction with unhappy people who live in non-free societies, that the benefit, the dividend of living in a free society is that you say what you think.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.

George W. Bush

Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.

Richard Ebeling

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.

Michael Ignatieff

Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Lawrence Lessig

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

Salman Rushdie

Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected.

Natan Sharansky

A free and democratic society is not the norm. When you look to the history books, world history was not based on great democratic societies but on imperialism, absolute rule, kings, queens, monarchs, dictators.

Rocky Carroll

Most of us assume that human beings have free will. However, . . . [we] are very much conditioned by our species, culture, family, and by the past in general. . . . It is rare for a human being to have free will. . . . (140)

Ravi Ravindra

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

John F. Kennedy

We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails.

Friedrich August von Hayek

To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies.

Cornel West

In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.

Bertrand Russell

When we are unwilling to draw clear moral lines between free societies and fear societies, when we are unwilling to call the former good and the latter evil, we will not be able to advance the cause of peace because peace cannot be disconnected from freedom.

Natan Sharansky

In a cross-cultural study of 173 societies (by Herbert Barry and L. M. Paxson of the University of Pittsburgh) 76 societies typically had mother and infant sharing a bed; in 42 societies they shared a room but not a bed; and in the remaining 55 societies they shared a room with a bed unspecified. There were no societies in which infants routinely slept in a separate room.