One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow. Charles Horton Cooley
When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty. Charles Horton Cooley
To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self. Charles Horton Cooley
We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first. Charles Horton Cooley
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles. Charles Horton Cooley
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. Charles Horton Cooley
If we divine a discrepancy between a man’s words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted. Charles Horton Cooley
So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. Charles Horton Cooley