It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.
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Letter to Pierre Freslon, 23 September 1853 Selected Letters, p. 296 as cited in Toqueville's Road Map p. 103Alexis de Tocqueville
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Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?
Robert Nozick
The gauge fields have eaten the Goldstone bosons and grown heavy.
Sidney Coleman
We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.
William Whewell
By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.
Erich Fromm
I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.
C. S. Lewis
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Todorov, Tzvetan
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