Quotes by Maurice Liber

“A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity.””

“Peasants seldom write letters, and for my father the arrival of a letter was an important ceremony that entailed quite a ritual: the glass of wine for the postman, the close scrutiny of his name on the envelope”

“Respect for law and liberty has served to justify police suppression of strikes in America; today it serves even to justify military suppression in Indochina or in Palestine and the development of an American empire in the Middle East. The material and moral culture of England presupposes the exploitation of the colonies. The purity of principles not only tolerates but even requires violence. Thus there is a mystification in liberalism. Judging from history and by everyday events, liberal ideas belong to a system of violence...Whatever one's philosophical or even theological position, a society is not the temple of value-idols that figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitutional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon man's relation to man. It is not just a question of knowing what the liberals have in mind but what in reality is done by the liberal state within and beyond its frontiers. Where it is clear that the purity of principles is not put into practice, it merits condemnation rather than absolution...Principles and the inner life are alibis the moment they cease to animate external and everyday life.””

“We are not accusing liberalism of being a system of violence; we reproach it with not seeing its own face in violence, with veiling the pact upon which it rests while rejecting as barbarous that other source of freedom”