Tyler

“. . . Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves rebelling against the sovereign of the earth, which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe, which is nature.

[trans. G. Rudé; A Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen].”
― Maximilien de Robespierre, Robespierre

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.”
― Alexander Grothendieck

“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”
― Idi Amin