Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Gretchen McCulloch

Quote by Gretchen McCulloch

Work

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Gretchen McCulloch

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Gretchen McCulloch. more

You May Also Like

“Impact of the mobile phone While 2G and 3G basic and feature phones were tremendously important for people to open their worlds, be able to communicate whenever and wherever they wanted and made life so much easier, 4G enabled the smartphone to revolutionize our lives in ways that go well beyond how we communicate. Besides calling and texting, almost 4 billion people around the world are connected to the mobile internet and use their devices to send money, navigate, book cab rides, follow the news, learn a new language, watch movies, listen to music, play video games, memorialize vacations, and, not least of all, participate in social media.”

AdventureMobileGamingOnline CommunicationTelecommunications
Book:Your phone, my life: Or, how did that phone land in your hand?
Create image

“Citizens were truly free when they could engage 'what is just and good without fear.' Liberty was therefore a positive act of will. Liberty was not an 'enemy of all authority' but 'a civil and moral' quality that made it possible for individuals, singly or in groups, to realize their potential. Tocqueville, who believed in the possibilities of human achievement, embraced the idea of liberty as capable of fostering equality. With liberty empowering individuals, equality could spread. There began the great challenge of modern history, that of balancing liberty and equality. Tocqueville kept arguing in successive formulations that the two concepts of liberty and equality, so easily at odds, actually touch and join. For one cannot be free without being equal to others; and one cannot be equal to others, in a positive sense, without being free. For Tocqueville, the combination of equality and liberty was the best possible human condition, while equality without liberty was among the worst, as he had argued in the prison report. Although Tocqueville asserted that equality and liberty ideally should be mutually reinforcing in democratic life, he recognized that men loved equality passionately but often resented the kind of demanding liberty that democracy required. It was simply too much work to set positive liberty in motion and sustain it. Indeed, Tocqueville underscored that 'nothing is harder than the apprenticeship of liberty.' As a result, Tocqueville charged, too many accept 'equality in servitude' (the result of leveling) and prefer it over the more demanding condition of 'inequality in freedom.' Only by acquiring the habit of liberty, Tocqueville argued throughout the book, could a democratic society make creative use of equality and liberty was the precondition for the dogma of popular sovereignty to 'emerge from the towns,' take possession of the government,' and become 'law of laws.”

FreedomEqualityTocqueville
Book:The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
Create image