Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Interpretation
Liberty is fundamentally about the power to make choices.
In this quote, Simone Weil emphasizes that true liberty is not merely a theoretical concept but a practical ability that individuals possess to make choices. It highlights the intrinsic connection between human freedom and the capacity to select from various options, suggesting that the essence of liberty lies in the act of choosing, which defines our autonomy and personal agency.
In practice
During a lecture on political philosophy, one might quote this to illustrate the concept of personal autonomy.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification β for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.
As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
Pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
Memory is the scribe of the soul.
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