Speak, speak, speak, & remember that whenever anyone's liberty to speak is denied, your liberty is denied also, & your place is where the attack is.
Voltairine De CleyreRead
I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.
Interpretation
The law can inadvertently create more criminals than it controls.
Voltairine De Cleyre suggests that laws meant to govern behavior can have the opposite effect, leading to an increase in criminality rather than a decrease. This thought challenges the efficacy of legal systems and calls for a reconsideration of how laws are structured and enforced.
In practice
During a debate on criminal justice reform, this quote can emphasize the need to rethink punitive measures.
Speak, speak, speak, & remember that whenever anyone's liberty to speak is denied, your liberty is denied also, & your place is where the attack is.
Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.
Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license," and they will define freedom out of existence.
The question of souls is oldβwe demand our bodies, now. We are tired of promises, god is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy.
Is it not enough that 'things are cruel and blind'? Must we also be cruel and blind?
Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if you don't believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before.
When journalists and politicians speak of a dwindling middle class that's under economic assault and a poor community that's getting bigger, they're talking about Ferguson. Independent of the racial demographics and dynamics of Ferguson, Missouri, there's a 'Ferguson' near you.
I am a deeply superficial person.
If asked how to cope with a great host of the enemy in orderly array and on the point of marching to the attack, I should say: "Begin by seizing something which your opponent holds dear; then he will be amenable to your will." Rapidity is the essence of war: take advantage of the enemy's unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots.
The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality.
And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.
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