By Beverley Dujay-Macdonald

Wisdom is revealed in every generation, but its light is often viewed as philosophical jargon and its great seers are seldom mentioned in the literature of teaching materials within our mainstream educational systems. These great voices of time gone by, some silenced by authority, their books burned to destroy opposition, and some disgraced by those who fear the light, are voices that still shout truth today. The following quotes from great seers were written in a book by Michael Hagos; The Cult of Having Versus The City of Being. If you are reading this Druthers newspaper then this same wisdom resides in you. May it be our generation that shouts out our own voices of truth, and by our good actions may we uncover the echoes of wisdom that speak to free our planet from darkness and bring it back to the light.

• All for ourselves and nothing for other people~ seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. (Adam Smith)
• As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power; ‘might’ will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no man is angry any more at wrongdoings or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, Zeus will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress people. (Greek myth on the Iron Age)

• All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. (Edmund Burke)
• The greater a man’s ignorance the more implicit his obedience, the more absolute his confidence in his leader. (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
• If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. (A. A. Lipscomb)
• Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned. (Mark Twain)
• You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization, which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. (Otave Mirbeau)
• The more men have been made to live in a fool’s paradise, the more they will be horrified and discouraged by the reality. (Bertrand Russell)
• The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. (Frederick Douglass, 1857)
• The core of the anarchist tradition is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian, hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it should be dismantled. Can you ever prove it? Well, it’s a heavy burden of proof to bear, but I think sometimes you can bear it. But the question that always should be asked uppermost in our mind is, ‘Why should I accept it?’ It’s the responsibility of those who exercise power to show that somehow it’s legitimate. It’s not the responsibility of anyone else to show that it’s illegitimate. It’s illegitimate by assumption. If it’s a relation of authority among human beings which places some above others, that’s illegitimate by assumption. Unless you can give a strong argument to show that it’s right, you’ve lost. (Noam Chomsky)
• In each country a web of myths evolves that allows the loyal citizenry to feel good about their nation that depicts it and its people as generous, progressive, decent to a fault in its international behavior. People who question these myths, whether myths about a beneficent past or the myths currently employed to put today’s actions and policies in a favorable light, are thus highly offensive to good taste and basic feelings of right and wrong. These doubters of myths may even pose a threat to communal integration and policy, which rest on this foundation of myths, and societies therefore usually have methods for containing or squelching critics who raise such questions. (Edward Herman)
• None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. (Goethe)
• Nationalism and state worship are the symptoms of a regression to incestuous fixation. Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness will he have found a new human form of rootedness, and will have transformed his world into a truly human home. (Erich Fromm)
• We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light. (Plato)