QUOTES
Man’s
right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate
human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be
more than an empty political slogan.
“I
am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of
a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural
science consisted of making this energy usable. This is the sole difference between
my work and all preceding knowledge.”
Granted
equal opportunity for expression, rationality is bound to win out in the end.
That is our great hope.
Love,
work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.
“Only the liberation
of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.”
I
would like to plead for my right to investigate natural phenomena without having
guns pointed at me. I also ask for the right to be wrong without being hanged
for it.
"Those
who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and
consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think
and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life.
This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive
man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of
life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute
their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes
that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all
men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation the living are
at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden, they are sucked
dry, then ridiculed or betrayed." "It is high time for the living to get tough,
for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force;
this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously
by the truth. . . . Anyone who wants to safeguard the life-force from the emotional
plague must learn to make at least as much use of the right of free speech that
we enjoy in America for good ends as the emotional plague does for evil ones.
Granted equal opportunity for expression, rationality is bound to win out in the
end. That is our great hope."
The
emotional plague is not an expression of conscious ill will or designed brutality.
The structural character of the plague made its effects the more dangerous. Emotional
plague is a character trait like cleanliness or deligence or truthfulness. It
is biopathic behavior lived out on the social scene in interhuman relationships.
Rooting
in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the
long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going.
And this makes politics and politicians.
"
The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will never cease as long as man
feels himself to be trapped.No matter how different the cries for freedom may
be, at bottom they always express one and the same thing: the intolerableness
of the organism's rigidity and the mechanical institutions of life, which are
sharply at variance with the natural sensations of life. If there should ever
be a society in which all the cries for freedom fade away, then man will have
finally overcome his biological and social deformity and have achieved genuine
freedom. Not until man acknowledges that he is fundamentally an animal, will he
be able to create a genuine culture.
The
responsibility for war falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of
people, for they have all the necessary means to avert war in their own hands.
In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these
masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer
more than anybody else.
