Josiah Warren quotes from his book: True Civilization (part2)

-Disconnecting all interests, and allowing each to be absolute despot or sovereign over his own, at his own cost, is the only solution that is worthy of thought. Good thinkers never committed a more fatal mistake than in expecting harmony from an attempt to overcome individuality, and in trying to make a state or a nation an “Individual”!
The individuality of each person is indestructible!

A state or nation is a multitude of indestructible Individualities, and cannot, by any possibility, be converted into any thing else! The horrid consequences of these monstrous and abortive attempts to overcome simple truth and nature, are displayed on every page of the worlds melancholy history.

-Having the Liberty to differ does not make us differ, but, on the contrary, it is a common ground upon which all can meet, a particular in which the feelings of all coincide, and is the first true step in social harmony. Giving full latitude to every experiment (at the cost of the experimentors), brings every thing to a test, and insures a harmonious conclusion as to the right one; and this is the only possible mode by which the harmonious result aimed at can be attained. Compulsion, even upon the right road, will never be harmonious. The SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL will be found on trial to be indispensable to harmony in every step of social organization, and when this is violated or infringed, then that harmony will be sure to be disturbed.

Robespierre may have carried the old idea a little farther than some Republicans, but he carried it no farther than the Grecians, the Venetians, and even the ancient and modern advocates of Community of property. In all of them, as well as in all forms of organized society, the first and great leading idea was and is, to sink the Individual in the state or body politic! When nothing short of the very opposite of this, which is, RAISING EVERY INDIVIDUAL ABOVE THE STATE, ABOVE INSTITUTIONS, ABOVE SYSTEMS, ABOVE MAN-MADE LAWS, will enable society to take the first successful step toward its harmonious adjustment.

-The individual should be THE ALL, and the Nation should be a multitude of sovereign Individuals, or be nothing.

-The Revolution had become the all-in-all--Humanity was blotted out. The laws, rules, and edicts of the Revolution were above all else--the revolution was the great Juggernaut, to which it was thought a virtue to procure victims. This is raising Institutions above the Individual!

(posted to promote awareness of the works of Josiah Warren)