Compulsion Quotes - Page 11

• The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living.

  Walter Rauschenbusch

  Motivational, Happiness, Real

  Walter Rauschenbusch (2011). “Christianizing the Social Order”, p.248, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

  Ayn Rand

  Liberty, Principles, Essentials

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.43, Penguin

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• He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid.

  Epictetus

  Fall, Wish, Desire

  Epictetus (2009). “The Enchiridion, or Handbook: With A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus”, p.172, The Floating Press

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• The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.

  William O. Douglas

  Abuse, Society, Liberty

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• I have talked about choosing rather than acting from compulsion. When you feel that you have to live according to someone else's direction or live so that you never disappoint or hurt anybody, then your life is a continual assessment of whether or not you please other people.

  Virginia Satir

  Hurt, Assessment, People

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• If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Pain, Dirty, Hands

  Robert Farrar Capon (1967). “The Romance of the Word: One Man's Love Affair with Theology : Three Books”, p.170, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

  John Taylor Gatto

  School, Personality, Style

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• One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ('a world of identical cases') as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:-we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Science, Law

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• Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Pain, Ethics, Morality

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.62, Courier Corporation

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• Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Life, Success, Nature

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• Human rights, human freedoms... and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world... while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.

  Vaclav Havel

  Powerful, Patriotic, Rights

  "Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism" by Slavoj Zizek in London Review of Books, Volume 21, No. 21 (pp. 3-6), www.lrb.co.uk. October 28, 1999.

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• The free man is not he who defies the rules ... but he who, recognizing the compulsions inherent in his being, seeks rather to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest each day's experience.

  Bernard Iddings Bell

  Freedom, Men, Each Day

  Bernard Iddings Bell (1933). “Men Wanted!”

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• I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, School, Knowledge

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• Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.

  H. L. Mencken

  Feet, Shining, May

  H. L. Mencken (1924). “Prejudices Fourth Series”

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• Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.

  Milton Friedman

  Support, Parent, Liberty

  Milton Friedman, William Richard Allen (1983). “Bright promises, dismal performance: an economist's protest”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

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• Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.

  Joseph Sobran

  People, Democracy, Liberty

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• There cannot be a good tax nor a just one; every tax rests its case on compulsion.

  Frank Chodorov

  Liberty, Libertarian, Cases

  Frank Chodorov (1947). “Taxation is Robbery ...”

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• Not merely by rules of conduct and religious observances, nor by much learning either, nor even by attainment of concentration, nor by sleeping alone, do I reach the happiness of freedom, to which no worldlings attain. If you have not put an end to compulsions, nurse your faith

  Gautama Buddha

  Religious, Sleep, Nurse

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• When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.

  Steven Kotler

  Motivation, Mastery, Alternatives

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• Study depends on the goodwill of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion.

  Quintilian

  Teaching, Quality, Students

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• Adrian!You Used compulsion on that guy. That.... I mean, it's....." "Awesome?Yeah,I Know

  Richelle Mead

  Mean, Guy, Used

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• I've been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can't really say where the desire came from; I've always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down!

  J. K. Rowling

  Book, Writing, Persistence

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• No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else's document.

  H. G. Wells

  Writing, Stronger, World

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• The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

  Simone Weil

  Military, War, Fighting

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• The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Responsibility, Opportunity, Democracy

  Woodrow Wilson (2012). “President Wilson's Addresses”, p.239, tredition

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