Emotions and Feelings

Oppression makes the wise man mad.

‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

I will have this done, so I order it done; let my will replace reasoned judgement.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings.

A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

A Stalin functionary admitted, ‘Innocent people were arrested: naturally—otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.’

[Hitler] must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall.

Of all the sources of human pride, mere wealth is the basest and most vulgar-minded. Real gentlemen are almost invariably above this low feeling.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts . . . perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Real freedom is freedom from fear, and unless you can live free from fear you cannot live a dignified human life.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.