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Anti Authoritarian Quotes

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Anti Authoritarian Quotes

“What we are suggesting is that indigenous doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid and political equality, which made such an impression on French Enlightenment thinkers, were neither (as many of them supposed) the way all humans can be expected to behave in a State of Nature. Nor were they (as many anthropologists now assume) simply the way the cultural cookie happened to crumble in that particular part of the world. This is not to say there is no truth whatsoever in either of these positions. As we’ve said before, there are certain freedoms – to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties – that tend to be taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience (as anyone reading this book, for instance, is likely to have been).Still, the societies that European settlers encountered, and the ideals expressed by thinkers like Kandiaronk, only really make sense as the product of a specific political history: a history in which questions of hereditary power, revealed religion, personal freedom and the independence of women were still very much matters of self-conscious debate, and in which the overall direction, for the last three centuries at least, had been explicitly anti-authoritarian.”

WomenFreedomLibertyPolitical EqualityAnti Authoritarian
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“The First Human (Sonnet 2632) Apes have lords and ladies, I don't. Apes have kings and queens, I don't. My time is born of soil and streets, my calendar transcends rome and greece. Apes have highnesses and excellencies, for apes have compost for a brain. Ape chase the "after", over life, for apes have alcohol in their vein. No wall is tall enough to contain my height, no pulpit sacred enough to baptize my eye, no table broad enough to accommodate my shoe, no accolade is bright enough to add to my light. Apes have cops and courts, I don't, for apes have guano for a cortex. I don't need angels in the air, I carry my wings in my pocket.”

ConsciousnessSelf RealizationSelf DeterminationSufismAdvaitaHierarchyAuthoritarianismFreethinkerNonconformityAnti Authoritarian
Book:With Love From A Blue Rock
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“The ‘Sturm und Drang’ was even more complicated in its sociological structure than the West European forms of preromanticism, and not merely because the German middle class and the German intelligentsia had never identified themselves closely enough with the enlightenment to keep their eyes sharply fixed on the aims of the movement and not to deviate from it, but also because their struggle against the rationalism of the absolutist regime was at the same time a struggle against the progressive tendencies of the age. They never became aware of the fact that the rationalism of the princes represented a less serious danger for the future than the anti-rationalism of their own compeers. From being the enemies of despotism they, therefore, became the instruments of reaction and merely promoted the interests of the privileged classes with their attacks on bureaucratic centralization. To be sure, their struggle was not directed against the social levelling tendencies of the system, with which aristocratic and upper middle-class interests were in conflict, but against its generalizing influence and violation of all intellectual distinction and variety. They championed the rights of life, of individual being, natural growth and organic development, against the rigid formalism of the rationalized administration, and meant not only the denial of the bureaucratic state with its mechanical generalization and regimentation, but also the repudiation of the planning and regulating reformism of the enlightenment. And although the idea of the spontaneous, irrational life was still of an indefinite and fluctuating nature and certainly hostile to the enlightenment, but not yet markedly conservative in its purpose, nevertheless, it already contained the essence of the whole philosophy of conservatism. It did not need much now to ascribe a mystical superrationality to this principle of ‘life’, in contrast to which the rationalism of enlightened thought seemed unnatural, inflexible and doctrinaire, and to represent the rise of political and social institutions from historical ‘life’ as a ‘natural’, that is to say, superhuman and superrational growth, in order to protect these institutions against all arbitrary attacks and to secure the continuance of the prevailing system.”

RomanticismRationalismAnti AuthoritarianAnti RationalismPre RomanticismSturm Und Drang
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
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“I don’t care if they have a badge, a billion dollars, or a mandate from the Queen herself. Power attracts the worst kind of psychopaths. If someone tells you they have power over you 'for your own good,' you tell them to fuck off, and you watch your back.”

Survival InstinctShadow WorkPower DynamicsThe New SincerityVisceral RealityAnti AuthoritarianAnti EstablishmentAggressive AutonomyRadical IndependenceThe Virtue Trap
Book:Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”
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