Luis Rubio
Freedom is an ever-scarcer commodity. In contrast with other key factors for the development of a nation, such as education and health, freedom is the factor that strengthens both the citizenry and society at large. A nation of free people is a nation with potential for growth and development. As Allan Bloom once wrote, “Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.” Obviously, in a society with inequalities as big as Mexico’s more than freedom is required to prosper, but prosperity is impossible without freedom.
This year I looked for quotes and anecdotes about freedom to celebrate the holidays.
“What is missing I all of this is the simple insight of the anarchist Charlotte Wilson: ‘We dream of the positive freedom which is essentially one with social feeling: of free scope for the social impulses now distorted and compressed.’ For Wilson, freedom is not a thing to be defined. It is something like humanity’s founding metaphysic. As with love or beauty, we don’t know what it is be we couldn’t get through a day without it. It is like Hegel’s concept of Geist (‘spirit’), an intuitive confidence in freedom as a guiding and ongoing human project.”
Curtis White, 2023
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Isaiah Berlin, 1958
“A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom”
Amiri Baraka, 1962
“There are certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired to support and perpetuate. One of these is that there is such a thing in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of opinion, independence of action… We are discreet sheep.”
Mark Twain, 1932
“Aren’t people absurd! They never use the freedoms they do have but demand those they don’t have; they have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”
Soren Kierkegaard, 1843
“Thanks to the fiesta, the Mexican opens out, participates… their frequency, their brilliance and excitement, the enthusiasm with which we take part, all suggest that without them we would explode. They free us, if only momentarily, from the thwarted impulses, the inflammable desires that we carry within us.”
Octavio Paz, 1950
“I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.”
Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
“Freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.”
Thomas Mann, 1940
“Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
Rosa Luxemburg, 1918
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
John Stuart Mill, 1859
“Woe the nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1974
“Let us make our own mistakes, but let us take comfort in the knowledge that they are our own mistakes.”
Tom Mboya, 1958
“I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.”
Coretta Scott King, 1994
“Freedom is not a luxury we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, an antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.”
Henry Steele Commager, 1954
“Civilization without restraint is impossible; and there can be no restraint where there is no liberty.”
Will Durant, 1961
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
Victor Frankl, 1946
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
Abraham Lincoln, 1858
www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof