Hallgrimur Helgason Quotes

I live in a kind of controlled awareness. I wouldn't call it fear, but it's an awareness. I know I have a responsibility to behave in a certain way. I'm able to do that.

Yes, we have the freedom to do what we please, but it only works because we don't do everything we might please - we should exercise some degree of personal, and corporate, responsibility.

Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.

I'm honored to serve as mayor of my hometown where our founders started America with three simple words: 'We, the people.' And when they said 'people' they didn't mean 'corporations.'

But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

I mean those people who are interested in good government will certainly contribute in order to make certain there's some counter-balance to those whose interests in good government is less.

There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.

I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves.

It is the duty of a citizen not only to observe the law but to let it be known that he is opposed to its violation.

When the mayor's concerned about something, eveybody's concerned about it.

The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution - nor by the courts - nor by the officers of the law - nor by the lawyers - but by the men and women who constitute our society - who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.

Independence means voluntary restraints and discipline, voluntary acceptance of the rule of law.

You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.

The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated.

There is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves.

A people among whom there is no habit of spontaneous action for a collective interest - who look habitually to their government to command or prompt them in all matters of joint concern - who expect to have everything done for them, except what can be made an affair of mere habit and routine - have their faculties only half developed; their education is defective in one of its most important branches.

What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them.

Ask counsel of him who rules himself well.

Swaraj is not a product of excitement or intoxication. Swaraj will be the natural and inevitable result of business like habits.

I would say democracy once meant an organizational society and a state, in which the individual citizen is - feels - responsible, and acts responsibly, and participates in decision-making.

My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

Behind real freedom, there lies discipline.