Obligation Quotes – Insightful Sayings and Reflections

"The fear of freedom is the fear of assuming responsibility."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"And I command you to kneel, Before the God of thunder and rock and roll, the spell you're under will slowly rob you of your virgin soul"

Kiss

"We can’t wait for mandatory vaccination to become unnecessary just because infection levels in the population are very high. Omicron as a kind of ‘dirty vaccination’ is not an alternative to a vaccination mandate."

Karl Lauterbach

"With the introduction of compulsory vaccination, it is actually illegal to live in Austria and not be vaccinated. And this can also have other consequences."

Karoline Edtstadler

"There is something totalitarian about requiring a person, under threat of punishment, to have a liquid injected into their body. This would only be justified in exceptional cases."

Kai Möller

"Although people initially submit under coercion and force, those who come after them obey without regret and willingly do what their predecessors did because they had to. That is why men who are born under the yoke and then raised and brought up in slavery are content to live in their original circumstances without further effort, unaware of any other state or right, and considering the state into which they were born to be entirely natural. ... the powerful influence of custom is in no way more compelling than in this, namely, the habituation to submission."

Étienne de La Boétie

"Your obedience is boundless, and, let me tell you, it is becoming more and more unforgivable with each passing day."

Thomas Mann

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."

Ezra Pound

"If you have to be persuaded, reminded, pressured, lied to, incentivized, coerced, bullied, socially shamed, guilt-tripped, threatened, punished and criminalized… If all of this is considered necessary to gain your compliance – you can be absolutely certain that what is being promoted is not in your best interest."

Ian Watson

"The German is like a slave who obeys his master without chains, without a whip, by the mere word, even by a glance. Servitude is within him, in his soul; spiritual slavery is worse than material slavery. The Germans must be liberated from within; nothing from without will help."

Heinrich Heine

"With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority."

Stanley Milgram

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."

Henry David Thoreau

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

Søren Kierkegaard

"The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others."

Thomas Sowell

"Looking the other way does not absolve you of responsibility."

Vegane Weisheiten

"The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective."

Aldous Huxley

"Where there are many limitations, there will soon be many confined people."

Wolf Lotter

"As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

Howard Zinn