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
The question of souls is old—we demand our bodies, now. We are tired of promises, god is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a demand for present reality over abstract beliefs and highlights disillusionment with religious institutions.
Voltairine De Cleyre's quote emphasizes a deep-seated frustration with spiritual promises and the perceived failures of religious systems to address the immediate concerns of human beings. It suggests a desire for tangible experiences and realities over the pursuit of metaphysical or spiritual assurances that have proved to be unfulfilling, and it critiques the institutional church as an impediment rather than a source of support.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about the role of religion in modern society.
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.
I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.
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.
The modern world lies under a pervasive sense of anguish, of being abandoned, or at least experiencing God as absent. Yet events that seem to turn our lives upside down and inside out are part of God's redemptive plan, not only for us, but for the world in which we live. God may be preparing a great awakening for the world, if God can find enough people to cooperate in this mysterious plan.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
It costs something to be a true Christian. It will cost us our sins, our self-righteousn ess, our ease and our worldliness.
Nelson Mandela is physically separated from us, but his soul and spirit will never die. He belongs to the whole world because he is an icon of equality, freedom and love, the values we need all the time everywhere.
And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.
The trouble with righting some wrongs is that it makes the remaining ones seem even more unbearable.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.