John Ruskin Quotes

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.

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.

The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.

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.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.

I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.

A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.

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.

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.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom but license.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.

The exercise of authority is odious, and they who know how to govern, leave it in abeyance as much as possible.

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

A well-governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

I don't like rules.

The fear that individuality will be crushed out by the growing 'tyranny' of standardization is the sort of myth which cannot withstand the briefest examination.

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.

Sometimes when you get out there and you want to just do your own thing, we have to reel that in.

I don't take well to rules.

There is no freedom in peaceful slavery.

I couldn't follow nobody's rules.

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.