The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
- Topic: Freedom, Learning
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Benedict Spinoza
Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
Man is a social animal.
It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.
The things which . . . are esteemed as the greatest good of all . . . can be reduced to these three headings: to wit, Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.
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The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
I shall work for the Republican party and call on all women to join me, precisely…for what that party has done and promises to do for women, nothing more, nothing less.
If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Freedom of information is a fundamental human right...for a nation that is afraid to let its people to judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
Never cross a man, not afraid to die.
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace, and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.
The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.
If there is anything in the world a person should fight for, it is freedom to pursue his ideal, because in that is his great opportunity for self-expression, for the unfoldment of the greatest thing possible to him.
Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
You find out the necessity of Liberty as you find out the necessity of air—by not having enough of it.
If we all can persevere, if we can in every land and office look beyond our own shores and ambitions, then surely the age will dawn in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
It does not take a majority of prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.
It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Personal growth is not a matter of learning new information but of unlearning old limits.
Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.
Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.
In school, you are given the lesson first. One the street, you're given the mistake first and then it's up to you to find the lesson, if you ever find it.
Read, read, read. Never stop reading. And when you can't read anymore… write.
You teach best what you most need to learn.
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.
