Apply reason to difficulties; harsh circumstances can be softened, narrow limits can be widened, and burdensome things can be made to press less severely on those who bear them cleverly.
Seneca, epistle to Serenus — translated and published as Tranquillity of Mind and Providence (1900) by William Bell Langsdorf.
If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 69.
In modern days, in civilised days, men’s choice determines nearly all they do. But in early times that choice determined scarcely anything.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872), p. 29.
Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (1954), Chapter 3 (p. 25).
Keep on thinking. Keep your thinking close to the ground, where it belongs. Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you.
It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947; 1972), p. 140.
[F]reedom means having no masters except your own consciences and common sense.
Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire (1994), p. 16.
[T]here is a tendency in descendants to be like their progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to differ from their progenitors. The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork — part resemblance, part contrast. In certain respects each born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other respects it is like the last. But the peculiarity of arrested civilisation is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that is, in early childhood, and before they can develop. The fixed custom which public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether it suits them or not.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).
The human soul has need of truth and of freedom of expression.
Simone Weil, Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943).
The need for truth requires that intellectual culture should be universally accessible, and that it should be able to be acquired in an environment neither physically remote nor psychologically alien.
The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).
To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress; Vol. IV, Reason in Art (1906).