Jonathan Franzen Quotes

The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans. ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

What is the basic unit of "self" in the expression "self-government?" How large does your group have to be before it can be a government unto itself? In fact, do you have to be part of a group at all?

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else.

When I talk about self-management, self-regulation, self-government, the word I emphasize is self, and my concern is with the reconstruction of the self. Marxists and even many, I think, overly enthusiastic anarchists have neglected that self.

We in the West seem to have made a fetish out of complete individual self-sufficiency, of not needing help, of being completely private except in a very few selected relationships.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognized that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.

We are in a degenerate state of self-government. In fact, even to use the words self-government, is not only an exaggeration, it's a lie. It's a big lie!

Who is the NRA anyway? They are usually middle-income people who only think of themselves, who want to have no government, really, except self-rule by themselves. I think that little cracks are starting to emerge in the NRA armor.

Meiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy - the rulers as well as the ruled?

There can be no self-government without self-discipline. There can be no self-government without self-control. There can be no liberty unless it is grounded in moral discipline and the ability to do what is right.

It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.

We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance.

No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see... all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable.

the qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. they are the result of habit and long training.

Nonviolent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country.

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

If we cannot count on ourselves to do the right thing how can we count on anyone or anything else? Self-government won't work without self-discipline.

The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican? It is evident that no other form would be reconcileable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the revolution; or with that honourable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.

I have a job to pay attention. It is my number one duty as a human being - to earn an experiment in self-government every day by spotlighting cockroaches who violate their oath to the US constitution and wipe their ass with the US Constitution.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealist Americans to public service that our citizens deserved and that our system of self-government demands.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.