Status Updates From چهار مقاله درباره آزادی

It is when the desire for choice is broken that what men do thereby loses all moral value, and actions lose all significance (in terms of good and evil) in their own eyes; that is what is meant by destroying people’s self-respect, by turning them, in your words, into rags.

...resistance to [the institutions of the polis] – in the name of individual liberty or even peaceful retreat from the market-place into private life – is scarcely conceived. Idiotes means just ‘private citizen’, but in so far as such a person is concerned with his own private affairs at the expense of those of the city, it can be a pejorative term, like the modern word etymologically related to it.

The unfree man is like someone who is drugged or hypnotised: whatever explanations he may advance himself for his behaviour, it remains unaltered by any change in his ostensible, overt motives and policies; we consider him to be in the grip of forces over which he has no control, not free, when it is plain that his behaviour will be predictably the same whatever reasons he advances for it.

Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed.

What troubles the consciences of Western liberals is, I think, the belief, not that the freedom that men seek differs according to their social or economic conditions, but that the minority who possess it have gained it by exploiting, or, at least, averting their gazes from, the vast majority who do not.

If we insist on judging others in terms of our transient standards we must not protest too much if they, in their turn, judge us in terms of theirs, which sanctimonious persons among us are too swift to denounce for no better reason that that they are not ours.

Our values – what we think is good and bad, important and trivial, right and wrong, noble and contemptable – all these are conditioned by the place we occupy in the pattern, on the moving stair…To each condition and generation its own perspectives on the past and future, depending upon where it has arrived, what it has left behind, and whither it is moving; its values depend on this same awareness.

The historical approach is inescapable: the very sense of contrast and dissimilarity with which the past affects us provides the only relevant background against which the feature peculiar to our own experience stand out in sufficient relief to be adequately discerned and described.

Legal liberties are compatible with extremes of exploitation, brutality and injustice.