Common as Air Quotes

“We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“that all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“Nothing is more dangerous to liberty than the power of entailed art and ideas. The very soul of a republic is the common citizen’s inalienable access to knowledge.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she as extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“Creativity in science is almost always cumulative and collaborative; it proceeds collectively and thus thrives when barriers to collectivity are reduced.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“Thus for Webster “the very soul of a republic” was to be found in “an equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“claim is often made that without the near-term rewards of monopoly privilege, knowledge would not advance. This assumes a strikingly narrow notion of what motivates people to do creative work.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“those who care for the good of their country have a duty to publish and that in doing so no one should allow “any private Views or Ends (inconsistent with the common Good) to bias or influence him.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“As for our own age, Habermas speaks of “a refeudalization of the public sphere,” what with the fusion of news and advertising, the corporate ownership of media, the return of government secrecy, the intrusion of celebrity into politics,”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“Collective inquiry is less prone to error than is solitary inquiry, individualism in this case being an impediment to knowledge.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership