Jasper Fforde Quotes

You have the belt, you fight who they tell you to fight.

We all have a tendency to want order in our lives. But order presupposes authority, and authority presupposes, sooner or later, that we'll all need hooves. It's going to happen sooner or later, isn't it? You know it is.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

You know, how much order is good? And when does order become too restrictive? Is a little bit of chaos okay, or is chaos always an evil force? I mean, these are questions that any kid who's ever been in a school cafeteria can relate to.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.

Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.

I remember being taught my place.

What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.

If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear. The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free.

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.

Since all people do not do their duty and some, on the contrary, commit injustices, for the sake of keeping order in society, injustices and all enterprises against this order must be repressed: which was possible only through authority given to some over others, and which made government necessary.

Those who can, must obey.

The path of freedom is blocked much more by those who wish to obey than by those who wish to command.

I follow the roles.

When you don't behave the way liberals think you should, their effort and their intention to control you compounds.

When you were under contract, you did what you were told to do.

I was raised with a sense of duty, obedience and guilt.

Some rules are there for a reason - but it's one thing to have a rule that protects and another to have rules that stifle.

We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.

Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.