Is there anything more terrifying than looking inward and discovering that everything you believe is merely what you have been told, and that to find your own values you must consult your memory?

In a society where each person destroys their individuality in order to conform to the crowd, each person effectively agrees to become the jailer of the Self. In such a society, suppressing honesty and suppressing the individual’s free search to understand and question ideas is not merely the suppression of freedom; it is the destruction of a society’s dynamism and inner unity.

There is nothing more magnificent or beautiful than to remain, regardless of your loneliness, an honest seeker of truth and to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and see that one person without whom the forces of truth in the world would have been one person fewer. To be able to tell yourself in solitude that even if you could not remove the chains from your own hands and feet or from those of your people, you at least freed your thought from its chains. No prison can imprison what you have freed within yourself, and no bullet will ever reach the bird you have released from its cage.

— Robert Ingersoll —