Dissident Veteran For Peace: Quotable: Freedom, Evil, & Utopia

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Quotable: Freedom, Evil, & Utopia

... to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.

Source: Character of Canon Tom Tallis in Madeleine L'Engle's The Young Unicorns (Macmillan, 2008), p. 202.

... when evil declares itself in its absolute form, it declares itself as an angel of light.

Source: Tallis, p. 237.

... Utopia ... is always a heresy, no matter how nobly conceived.

Source: Tallis, p. 241.

Labels: art and literature, Christianity, freedom, Madeleine L'Engle, philosophy, quotations