Freedom and Individuality
"Society exists for man, and not man for society. One cannot realize freedom and establish the worth of man, by suppressing freedom and the worth of man." - Letters to Mme K, page 33
"Christianity, however, honours the individual personality, the single human being. Thus, socialism on a Christian foundation can only ever be a personalist socialism. Every human being is more valuable than the state, the nation, indeed more valuable than all the great achievements in history." - Christian and Marxist Understandings of History, 6
"Nothing is more demoralizing than a dictatorship over thought, an intellectual tyranny that stifles individual judgment and moral responsibility under the guise of revolutionary ideology. [...] The tragedy of our time is not merely the loss of individuality but the conscious suppression of it, where fear has replaced free judgment, and collective obedience is enforced by the structures of power." - The Transformation of Communism in Soviet Russia, pages 6, 7
"Freedom is a spiritual phenomenon, and it diminishes as one moves away from the spiritual side of life and deeper into the material. The necessity for freedom increases as one approaches matter." - On the Difficulties of Freedom, 1
"Revolutionary humanism seeks to restore and consolidate the "natural" — that is, the chaotic and beast-like man. It sees the slave as free, the powerless as a creator, the beast as a god." - The Lie of Humanism, 7
"Freedom is not so much a right as it is a duty, a burden, not an ease. Thus, it is not man who demands freedom. Freedom and happiness: the organization of happiness takes away freedom. Dostoevsky reveals the dynamics of freedom, emphasizing its necessity, and lack of freedom is slavery." - On Dostoevsky, 2
"Freedom is not a truth subordinated to necessity. Freedom, given to the world, becomes a heavy burden when humanity forgets its spiritual origins and reduces it to a social function." - On the Difficulties of Freedom, 3
"The brilliant Marxist critique of capitalism is based on the idea that in the capitalist economic system, an alienation from human nature takes place—a transformation of the human being into a mere object, a mere commodity. Human labor, indeed all human activity, which underlies social life as its fundamental reality, is falsely presented as belonging solely to the objective values of the economy. [...] Therefore, in Marxism, there is great hidden truth concerning social life, but also great untruth regarding spiritual life." -Christian and Marxist Understandings of History, 5
"[The Russian people] were willing to tolerate the autocracy of Czars in the past and are willing to tolerate the alien autocracy of Stalin to-day. A large part of the reason is that the exercise of authority is intolerable to them. They have no wish to rule. They are grateful to anyone who will take the burden of responsibility off their shoulders—a burden ever harder to bear than the burden of freedom." - THE RUSSIAN IDEA by Christopher Hollis, 3-4
"Nothing that is general, nothing that is abstract exists really, only the concrete, the individual, and unique exists really. And this is the true revolution, and not a massacre like all political revolutions. There is eternal conscience as a revelation of God in the depth of man." - Letters to Mme K, 19
"In everyday life, too, the discipline of will must conquer the undisciplined chaos and anarchy. We must imbue ourselves with a consciousness that believes in the spiritual power of personality, in inner authority over the external." - On the Paths of Willpower Discipline, 1 (11)
"Being determines consciousness. A person’s existence determines their reason. Reason is dynamic; it depends on the individual’s state and the quality of their existence. [...] The knower is a human, and knowledge is human. [...] The quality of knowledge is not defined by detachment from all humanity but by an integrated, enlightened humanity. It is determined through the liberation of the individual — freeing the person from bondage to lower states that distort consciousness." - THE PHILOSOPHER AND EXISTENCE, 4 (74)