Obstacle Quotes - page 6
It may be said that the conditions are glorious for the French Republic: it must be confessed that they are; and there is not a Briton but who ought honestly to rejoice that such is the fact. The people of France resisted, as they ought to do, the whole combination of powers who would have imposed upon them a constitution contrary to their own will. Their's was the cause of liberty-the cause of mankind at large. They had every obstacle to oppose which imagination can suggest-but they have triumphed over such obstacles-their cause has been crowned with an everlasting triumph...We have not, I acknowledge, obtained the objects for which the War was undertaken-so much the better-I rejoice that we have not. I like the Peace the more on this very account.
Charles James Fox
It is the Path by which, to use a simile often used, instead of going round and round the mountain by an ever-climbing spiral, man climbs straight up the mountainside regardless of cliff and precipice, regardless of gulf and chasm, knowing there is nothing that can stop the Eternal Spirit, and that no obstacle is stronger than the strength that is omnipotence, because it has its source in Omnipotence itself.
Annie Besant
The British monarchy inculcates unthinking credulity and servility. It forms a heavy layer on the general encrustation of our unreformed political institutions. It is the gilded peg from which our unlovely system of social distinction and hierarchy depends. It is an obstacle to the objective public discussion of our own history. It tribalises politics. It entrenches the absurdity of the hereditary principle. It contributes to what sometimes looks like an enfeeblement of the national intelligence, drawing from our press and even from some of our poets the sort of degrading and abnegating propaganda that would arouse contempt if displayed in Zaire or Romania. It is, in short, neither dignified nor efficient.
Christopher Hitchens
It is above all over the question of the State that socialists are divided. Two main currents can be discerned in the factions that exist among us which correspond to differences in temperament as well as in ways of thinking, but above all to the extent that one believes in the coming revolution.
There are those, on the one hand, who hope to achieve the social revolution through the State by preserving and even extending most of its powers to be used for the revolution. And there are those like ourselves who see the State, both in its present form, in its very essence, and in whatever guise it might appear, an obstacle to the social revolution, the greatest hindrance to the birth of a society based on equality and liberty, as well as the historic means designed to prevent this blossoming. The latter work to abolish the State and not to reform it.
Peter Kropotkin
