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Not only psychiatry itself but also the values reflected in its statistical definition of “normalcy” serve to condition men to habitual, unthinking, conformist behavior.

— Benjamin Barber Forced to be Free (1971)

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More quotes by Benjamin Barber

Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.

A Passion for Democracy: American Essays (2000)

Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.

Jihad vs. McWorld (1996)

We know ourselves by understanding our temporality, our embeddedness in time, our connection to roots—even roots from which we have knowingly severed ourselves.

An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992)

The real struggle is in fact not for but against the minds of men. Persuasion as a form of coercion represents an assault on consciousness and intentionality.

Forced to be Free (1971)

I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and nonlearners.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Benjamin Barber (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.