13 Quotes by Allen Wheelis

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.

A free man is not a slave who has escaped his master; such a man is but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A free man, though he may be overpowered, may be killed, cannot be reduced to servitude; something in him asserts freedom as an inviolable right.It is not negotiable.He does not *ask* that others respect his right, he *requires* it; and it is ultimately his willingness to die for this freedom which forms the basis of his demand that others respect it.

A man in chains need not be a slave. If he has pride and self-respect he is a free man though a prisoner, and a constant danger to his jailers. Conversely, a slave who escapes is not a free man, but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A slave is one who accepts the identity ascribed to him by a master: "You are an inferior and unworthy person and so will remain, and therefore must serve me with obedience and humility.

The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.

As no designation of good and evil can be absolute, neither can it be fixed; no law which is just now will be forever just, and no political institution designed to secure the good can remain the best means to that good.

Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists.

We must affirm freedom and responsibility without denying that we are the product of circumstance, and must affirm that we are the product of circumstance without denying that we have the freedom to transcend that causality to become something which could not even have been provisioned from the circumstances which shaped us.

To know the good is a dangerous thing; to know it for sure is usually fatal for somebody.

Desire is endless and unappeasable, is most intense where most forbidden, and is never far from despair.