John Steinbeck Quotes

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

The one thing I will never do is become pigeonholed.

It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

Collectivism can be imposed only upon slaves—and then collectivism becomes the negation of humanity.

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

The fear that individuality will be crushed out by the growing 'tyranny' of standardization is the sort of myth which cannot withstand the briefest examination.

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.

When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

We have the universe to roam in in imagination. It is our virtue to be infinitely varied. The worst tyranny is uniformity.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

I don't just want to be another cog in the gears of Hollywood.

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.