The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Interpretation
True freedom comes from understanding one's own moral responsibility.
This quote emphasizes the idea that true freedom is rooted in the awareness of personal moral responsibility. The individual recognizes that no external rules or societal norms can dictate their actions if they possess the understanding that they are accountable for their choices, allowing them to act in accordance with their own values, whether that means complying with or challenging existing norms.
In practice
In a speech about personal autonomy and ethics, one might use this quote to underline the importance of personal accountability.
The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
An armed society is a polite society.
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
Few things in this world are more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas.
Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. “Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.
In the past we have tried to make a distinction between animals which we acknowledge have some value and other which, having none, can be liquidated when we wish. This standard must be abandoned. Everything that lives has value simply as a living thing, as one of the manifestations of the mystery that is life.
Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."
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