4
" When I started off, I believed that the true determinant of how great I was was through my lifestyle, wardrobe, the type of car I drove, being seen with the right people; and if I made it unscathed, the estates I would own, and how the media would be singing my name like Urbanas’s. I saw my father apologizing for not supporting me.
But life is a twisty bastard.
When I called it quits on robbery, drugs, hedonism, and paedophilia and most probably necromancy—the ‘scarletest’ of sins according to me—I made a vow never to live a profane life again, not even the most subtle of snares would entrap me. I had seen them all, even in their disguises, and I knew them when I saw them. "
― Vincent de Paul , TWISTED TIMES: Son of Man
11
" Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked. Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process, which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law, in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which...is necessary...as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary). "
― A.C. Grayling , The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times
13
" THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.
Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society. "
― Hannah Arendt , The Origins of Totalitarianism