Semper pluris feci ego
potioremque habui libertatem [multo] quam pecuniam.
I have always valued and preferred my liberty far beyond money.
Gnaeus Naevius (c. 270 – c. 201 BC), translated by W. F. H. King, Classical and Foreign Quotations, 3rd ed. (1904), no. 2388.
Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.… [L]et every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a‑flowing.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
Art may make a suit of clothes; but nature must produce a man.
David Hume, “The Epicurean,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741 – 2; 1748).
Man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.
José Ortega y Gasset, “Man Has No Nature,” in History as a System (1962).
Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries.
David Hume, “Of The Independency of Parliament,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741 – 2; 1748).
[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but — from what we can judge to-day — of any civilisation. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chap.IX: “The Primitive and the Technical.”