George Woodcock
You can be bound by physical things, as I am by certain sicknesses, but nevertheless you can still be free to recognize that all initiatives really come from yourself if you don't depend upon structures of government or structures of any kind.
When you act dramatically in that way it often has a consequence that is very negative.
What I'm going to be given I gather is not the key to the city, which in many cities is the case. It's the freedom medal, and for me freedom has always been associated traditionally within the city.
We had lived among them for short periods with great friendship, great understanding.
We don't allow people to be knights, to be knighted by the Queen of England, but we do allow them to become members of the Order of Canada.
This is an important tradition, the link between the idea of the city and the idea of freedom. That's why I've accepted it.
They may have been that much better, but gradually the tortoise, or the bull if you're going to use the Taurean symbol, marches forward slowly. I think what I am writing now is better than what they were writing when I admired them.
They decided that unpaid leave could only be granted through the decision of a council that consisted almost entirely of scientists who couldn't understand my reasons for wanting to go so. They said no, no unpaid. So I immediately resigned.
Structures are fine as long as they are controlled by the people who actually work within the structures, but they're dicey even there.
Orwell was the sort of man who was full of grievances. He was very loyal. Once he got to know you, he was extremely loyal. He hated passionately and irrationally.
Of course when I first started to work on the Doukhobors they were suspicious, as they are of all outsiders, because they have had a bad press, and that sort of thing, but once I got to know them I found that they were great friends.
Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing.
My split with the university was over the fact that I had become involved with helping Tibetans in India.
My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn't merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit.
It's very hard to place them politically, because their leaders are quite prominent, but the whole theory behind the Doukhobor movement is that the leaders are the inspired spokesmen of the community and everything is decided at a meeting.
It's a derogatory thing to say it's a form of evasion, but you evade those unpleasant choices, you evade those situations in which you are insubordinate, you evade the situations that will offend your dignity.
It even has the same phraseology as the English orders of knighthood, companions and this sort of thing.
It doesn't really mean a great deal of difference to a life. You live as you wish to do and if a job is oppressing, you leave it. I've done it on several occasions.
In most English school it is a brutal kind of pro-sporty spirit that militates against the intellectual who is looked on as a weakling.
If you think of the Greek city-states where they developed all the ideas of democracy, if you think of the medieval cities where the serf could flee from his lord's estate, once he got through the gates he was a free man.