Donald Kagan Quotes

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

'Liberation' is an interesting word because you can be liberated from external things and also from your internal dialogue.

Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

I am not a prisoner of conscious, but people try to make me one sometimes. It is both a gift and a curse. It's a high honour but can create limitations - I have to be fluid.

I was always free because I felt free. It's very important to be free inside. The most important thing is to feel free.

I'm crazy. I know I'm crazy 'cause Desmond Tutu told me, and he's very clever. He said, 'You must free yourself, be more of who you are. Be more crazy.' And I'm going to.

We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of our oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.

There shall be no slavery of the mind.

I don't think we ought to base our policy on what the conventional wisdom is.... The conventional wisdom usually is wrong.

I always grew up with, 'Question authority.'

Each of us has been endowed with the perfect power to be free. Slavery is a state of mind that fails to acknowledge the slave's own power.

Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence.

Reality isn't a vast, fixed scheme trapping you without choice. At any moment you have the choice to break out of what is really trapping you-your automatic reactions dredged up from the past.

Freedom begins between the ears.

Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.

Your life can only be as free as your perception of it

Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.

The mind aware of itself is a pilot... vastly freer than a passenger mind.

Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.