The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.
Interpretation
A society's disregard for individual rights can lead to oppressive government control.
This quote by Gerry Spence suggests that when a nation becomes apathetic towards the value of individual life and rights, it sets the stage for tyranny to take hold. The erosion of empathy and the prioritization of authority over personal freedom can result in the loss of democracy and the rise of oppressive regimes, warning us of the importance of vigilant protection of rights for all individuals.
In practice
In a speech about civil liberties, one might quote Spence to emphasize the necessity of protecting individual rights.
Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
The best antidote for crime is justice. The irony we often fail to appreciate is that the more justice people enjoy, the fewer crimes they commit. Crime is the natural offspring of an unjust society.
When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.
The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, βAre we free?β I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?
The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.
The ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity.
When the gospel is at stake, everything is at stake.
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.
Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.
History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
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