Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
Buddha was speaking in a village square one day, when one of the inhabitants started to abuse him. Buddha paused and said to the man, "If you offer me a piece of paper and I refuse to accept it, what happens to the paper?" "Why, it stays with me, of course," the villager replied. Buddha smiled gently, "And that is exactly what I am doing with your abuse," he said. "I am not accepting it, therefore it stays with you."
When a man's knowledge is sufficient to attain, and his virtue is not sufficient to enable him to hold, whatever he may have gained, he will lose again.
Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.
A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the facade of his appearance.
For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.
No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty