All manners of freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of conscious, freedom of thought...it accepts tolerance. But it is not an atheist society. Religion is the private affair of an individual...be present in the public domain, but state has to be clearly separated from religion. When I'm speaking, I'm speaking only for myself. At the same time, I know that these ideas have wide support among the Iranian population.
Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. It compels wide tolerance not only for their expression but also for the organization of people and forces to bring about the acceptance of the dissenter's claim....We have alternatives to violence.
When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.
The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people take their games seriously and take on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles because he knows that it is all a game.
There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineament loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared, that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.
In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.
Truth is transcendent. There are many expressions of it and ways to glimpse it. We cannot hold it in our clenched fist, but must hold it in our open palm and invite others to see it for themselves.
A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.
Communist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about. ... In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing.
Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution of that will by others.