Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.
John Stuart Mill • On Liberty
the mental inertia that John Stuart Mill called the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It le... See more
Bennett Gilbert • On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays
People are entitled to self-government; that is, to such government as is self-made. They are not necessarily entitled to a special and elaborate machinery that somebody else has made. It is their right to make it for themselves, but it is also their duty to think of it for themselves.
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • The New Jerusalem
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
John O'Donohue • John O’Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty
Historian Henry Adams stated that power is a tumor that ends up killing its victims’ sympathies.
Paul Jarvis • Company of One
Genius is the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.