Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

Since I was 9, I'd been told what to say, what to think.

Once a person insists on how you are to think he immediately begins to insist on how you are to behave.

We must form men so that they can only will what we wish them to will.

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

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

I never liked being told what to do, so even in school plays, I never liked being an actor.

You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.

It is hard to imagine, but in a Maryland school, a 13- year old girl was arrested for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. There is more at work than stupidity and a flight from responsibility on the part of educators, parents and politicians who maintain these laws, there is also the growing sentiment that young people constitute a threat to adults and that the only way to deal with them is to subject them to mind-crushing punishment.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

Unquestioning obedience is for slaves, the uneducated and the pathetic.

Obedience is the primary object of all sound education.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

I'm no one's lap dog, you can't put me on a leash.

I can't imagine people telling me what to do - I just can't imagine it.

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

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.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic.

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 would not like a king who could obey.

I remember being taught my place.

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.

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.