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Unless Socialists are prepared openly and avowedly to profess that the satisfaction of the needs of each individual must be their very first aim; unless they have prepared public opinion to establish itself firmly at this standpoint, the people in their next attempt to free themselves will once more suffer a defeat.
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This appeared in "The First Work of the Revolution" an article by an unidentified author in Freedom, Vol. 1, No. (11 August 1887), where another article had been written by Kropotkin.

 

Peter Kropotkin

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“Where exactly do you suffer?” the physician asks the patient. “Alas, dear doctor, everywhere,” he answers. “But how are you suffering?” continues the physician, “so that I can diagnose the illness.” No one asks me this, nor do I need it. I know very well how I suffer-I suffer sympathetically. This is exactly the suffering that is able to shake me deeply. Even though I am depressingly and sincerely convinced that I am good for nothing, as soon as there is danger I really have the strength of a lion. When I suffer autopathetically, I am able to stake all my will, and depressed as I am and depressingly brought up, the appalling finds me all the more prepared for what is even more appalling. But when I suffer sympathetically, I have to use all my power, all my ingenuity, in the service of the appalling to reproduce the other’s pain, and that exhausts me. When I myself suffer, my understanding thinks of grounds for comfort, but when I suffer sympathetically, I dare not believe a single one of them, for I cannot, of course, know the other one so accurately as I can know whether the presuppositions are present that are the condition for its effectiveness. When I suffer autopathetically, I know where I am; I place signs along the road of suffering so that I can have something to hold to, but when I suffer sympathetically I go astray, for I cannot really know where the other one actually is, and at every moment I must start all over again, prepared at the next moment to be able to think an even more appalling possibility, the dreadfulness of which I must endure in order not to shirk anything.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 — the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains — triumphed and then ended in failure. ... Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

 

Karl Popper

 

Jesus Christ has not come to establish social justice any more than he has come to establish the power of the state or the reign of money or art. Jesus Christ has come to save men, and all that matters is that men may come to know him. We are adept at finding reasons-good theological, political, or practical reasons, for camouflaging this. But the real reason is that we let ourselves be impressed and dominated by the forces of the world, by the press, by public opinion, by the political game, by appeals to justice, liberty, peace, the poverty of the third world, and the Christian civilization of the west, all of which play on our inclinations and weaknesses. Modern protestants are in the main prepared to be all things to all men, like St. Paul, but unfortunately this is not in order that they may save some but in order that they may be like all men.

 

Jacques Ellul

 

There is nothing in the world that could make me turn from the law. With a clear conscience, I am prepared to answer for each and every one of my political and administrative orders and actions, and to do so before the court of public opinion...

 

Ahmed Djemal

 

Though quieta non movere may at times be a wise maxim for the statesman it cannot satisfy the political philosopher. He may wish policy to proceed gingerly and not before public opinion is prepared to support it, but he cannot accept arrangements merely because current opinion sanctions them. In a world where the chief need is once more, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to free the process of spontaneous growth from the obstacles and encumbrances that human folly has erected, his hopes must rest on persuading and gaining the support of those who by disposition are "progressives," those who, though they may now be seeking change in the wrong direction, are at least willing to examine critically the existing and to change it wherever necessary.

 

Friedrich Hayek