Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Freedom has a price. Most people aren't willing to pay it.

Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

If, on occasion, the knowledge brought by science leads to an unhappy end, this is not to the discredit of science but is rather an indication of an imperfect ability to use wisely the gifts placed within our hands.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

As contemporary history reminds us we are human to the extent that we are able to chose between alternatives.

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.

War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not be.

Right is what you should do, wrong is what you really want to do.

My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

Man is really free, the real man cannot but be free.

My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature - the wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.

It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

Half-liberty comes with wisdom, full liberty with death.

Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.

Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.

Give a man free hands, and you'll know where to find them.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

I have come to realise that men are not born to be free.

I want no heaven for which I must give my reason; no happiness in exchange for my liberty, and no immortality that demands the surrender of my individuality. Better rot in the windowless tomb, to which there is no door but the red mouth of the pallid worm, than to wear the jeweled collar of a god.

Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.