"Human beings are at their best when they are free of authority." Agree or disagree?

[bemildred]

65. Many people fear liberty, as you can now see.

“Men will not be free until the last King is strangled with the guts of the last priest.” – Diderot

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
--Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

“Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down … Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. It's one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.” H. L. Mencken

"Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty." - Aldous Huxley, author of the required-reading-list classic, Brave New World.

"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." ~ George Orwell 1984

“Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, as if it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbors pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately on the need or desire he has for it, – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor.” – John Ruskin “Unto the Last”

"Such euphemisms illustrate one major function of language, which is to keep reality at bay." – John Carey "Eyewitness to History" Introduction

Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will’s impulse at the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly. ... Nature is still there however. She contrasts her calm skies and her reasons with the madness of men. Until the atom too catches fire and history ends in the triumph of reason and the agony of the species. But the Greeks never said that the limit could not be overstepped. They said it existed and that whoever dared to exceed it was mercilessly struck down. Nothing in present history can contradict them. A. Camus ‘Helen’s Exile’

When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an
act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A
group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a
six-year-old. "It is always so," my mother said. "You do things
together which not one of you would think of doing alone." ...
Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective
responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military
establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have
been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things
together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.
-- Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope"