Jacob Bronowski Quotes

As for politics, I’m an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can’t stand caged animals. People must be free.

If, in the name of liberty, we allow individuals to act in a way that damages the wellbeing of the whole, it will inevitably mean the breakdown of mutuality, thereby changing the very nature of our society.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

The very freedom we seek cannot be attained until we chain some of our exaggerated individuality.

Whatever objection there is to so called violation of personal liberty, it does not count when the supremacy of the law and the stability of our intuitions are menaced.

I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased — short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.

The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.

Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish.

The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within that system of necessary restraints.

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes.

There are all too many who, on account of their notorious ineptitude, thrive better in a rationalist system than in freedom. Freedom is one of those difficult things.

Freedom is like taking a bath: You got to keep doing it every day.

As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.

I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

By 1980, we knew it was time to renew our faith, to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society. We believed then and now there are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.

Freedom is for everyone, whatever lifestyle they choose, as long as it's peaceful and honest

Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies.

I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces - with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way government sticks its nose in everything, now.

No single person, including the President of the United States, should ever be given the power to make a medical decision for potentially millions of Americans. Freedom over one's physical person is the most basic freedom of all, and people in a free society should be sovereign over their own bodies. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

People mostly do as they like, and that would be fine if they'd let other people do the same.

A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other; for envy creates the beginning of strife.