Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.

There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.

The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed — we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.

Liberty is the great developer.

Why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience?

I am at liberty to vote as my conscience and judgment dictates to be right, without the yoke of any party on me, or the driver at my heels, with his whip in hand, commanding me to ge-wo-haw, just at his pleasure.

The strength of this nation is weakened more by those who suppress the freedom of others than by those who are allowed freely to think and act as their consciences dictate.

… people should not be hindered from attaining development in accordance with their own culture.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops,—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

The West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence.

We stand then for freedom, because we claim the right to develop our own individuality and evolve our own destiny along our own lines, unembarrassed by what Western civilization has to teach us and unhampered by the institutions which the West has imposed.

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

The final goal of all human endeavor is the development of the human soul.

When you've got education, you've got knowledge and power and confidence to go out in the world.

Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.

When you give kids the tools necessary to change their destiny, it's really empowering.

Atlanta has become and has always been a place where you create your own universe.

We live in the world's greatest democracy; we want for nothing. And that which we want, we can work toward achieving.

I am the American Dream.

Being independent opens the doors to so many other things for you.

I have the luck to choose what to do in my life.

The mantra I grew up with was that no matter where you came from, hard work and education could set you free.