Hermann Hesse Quotes

Collectivism can be imposed only upon slaves—and then collectivism becomes the negation of humanity.

People don't want other people to be people.

It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.

I am a man who perceives life in a certain way, a man who rejects things that defecate on humankind, who rejects anything that will not give people room for dissent.

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

Are you crazy? I don't want to wear ideas. I don't want to have all these complicated thing.

A better everyday life means getting away from status and conventions -- being freer and more at ease as human beings.

We just have to be ourselves.

We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.

Humanity is at a fork in the road and we can no longer stand there staring at the map pondering which direction to take. It is hardly a choice, after all. One Road leads to a global fascist dictatorship that would control every aspect of our lives, including our thoughts. The other will open the door to freedom and potential on a scale never experienced in the 'world' as we have known it. Hard one, isn't it? A choice between a prison and a paradise?

We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn't have made us all different.

Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.

Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

This is the difference between slavery and freedom. The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen-and this is what freedom means-is in a position to choose his own way of life.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

The world will not know liberty until all that is religious and political is transformed into something simple and human and made susceptible to criticism and denial.

Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.

Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.

In order to exist, man must rebel.